


there is a crack in the world

by FIPindustries



Category: Original Work
Genre: post apocalyptic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-09-26 12:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 81,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9897728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FIPindustries/pseuds/FIPindustries
Summary: The world was broken by a monster who now sits at the throne of an empire. A woman has a mission.





	1. Chapter 1

           

**_"There was a war that left a monster at the throne of the empire_ ** ****

**_And a crack in the middle of the world._ ** ****

**_And this war was fought by fools compelled by wild desire_ ** ****

**_And dreams, of bountiful land and gold_ ** ****

**_Yet the war concluded in doom and fire_ **

**_And ever since it was long foretold_ ** ****

**_If  ever the emperor’s mirth expire_ ** ****

**_Then that very same doom and fire_ ** ****

**_Shall rise again to consume us all"_ ** ****

**_Anonymous- there is a crack in the world, fragment from the song of the last war._ **

 

            The world has been broken and she does not care.

            Broken beyond repair, an unsolvable problem, a lost cause. It is all dying and she does not care. Listen; hear the cries, the woes, the pain and the hurt and the suffering of a thousand children (for there are no more but a thousand left). All the wrongs aching to be set right. The unassailable sense that _this is not how it should be, this is not how the world should work,_ and she does not care. And even if it wasn't already too late she still would not care. She has a mission, and nothing matters but the mission. None can bear to stand in her path, she will not stop. Oh, but she can see it, how unfair and monstrous it all is, she is aware, she can look at it straight in the eye and say “I have my own fucking problems, fuck off” and she’ll let the world there to rot and fester in its misery and she will not look back. She has a job to do. Her job has taken her to many places, all as broken and worn down as he rest, and here she arrives, one more time, to one more dejected location. 

            By the current standards of this world this place she just reached would be something akin to a bar-restaurant. There is a bar where drinks and foods will be served, and some surfaces where to put the aforementioned goods to consume them, but now, don’t come asking for fancy things like chairs or cutlery. What do you think this is, a beautiful, just and luxurious world where people are able to not use their hands to consume sustenance if they so desire? That this is an unbroken world where people are allowed to be happy? Get out of here with your posh expectations, by jeeves and the emperor’s mirth that if you do not, and hastily so, we will use you to replenish the impoverished provisions we have in the fridge, we are all starving in this country and cannibalism has long ago stopped being something frowned upon, if still illegal.

            Yet, look, there used to be a door on the frame! Truly the business must have gone abnormally well for this ostentation of wealth, why, it even had functioning locks within it. But such exuberance is just a taunt now-a-days. A challenge, it is a mark of great hubris to show this flagrantly that you have things worth guarding. And now the door lays in two pieces in the ground, and the sand and the hot air of the nearby desert is free to spoil the wooden floors inside.

            She takes a look at the interior of the building wherein she sees chipped furniture, stained walls and a kid, crying in the midst of it all. The woman walks up to the kid, kneels down, close to him and takes out her round shades, revealing her eyes, one healthy and the other not so much. She does what she must to fulfill her mission, and right now she must be careful and kind lest she gets no answers.

            “What happened?” she asks, in quiet tones.

            “S-sh-she ca-a-ame here and sh-sh-she did all this” answered the kid, between sobs.

            “Who came?”

            “Harmonica”

            So it was true, her instincts hadn’t failed. She was on the right path.

            “Please, tell me what she did”

            The kid told his tale.

* * *

 

            It had been a normal day. The father woke him up at five in the morning, as always, to go to the nearest river that was not yet contaminated and fetch some water for the brew of the day. The son went with four big metal buckets across the mile of desert that separated him from his destination. Once there he discovered that the nearest river that was not yet contaminated could no longer be called that. This was also normal. So he went to look for another river that was not yet contaminated. He didn’t find any. This was normal as well. Rivers were found and rivers were lost. Perhaps the streams will eventually get cleaned up by the workers of the empire, it had happened once or twice. Or perhaps they would have to drink contaminated water for the rest of their lives, they have done so for periods of months at a time, they could do it again. Such was life. Still, he made some effort to find the least contaminated water and carry the four fully filled buckets back to home.

            His search had taken far longer than expected and his father was angry at this. Understandably, he received a minor whooping for slowing down the brewing process which would eventually keep the clients thirsty when they opened. Then, with a pinker rump, went on to do his second task of the day which was to carefully remove all specs of dust and sand from the bar-restaurant. Monumental task which he carried out without fatigue or complaint.  He was in the middle of this when a-knock-a-knock-knock went the door.

            The kid was scared, if his father saw that he was still cleaning the place when clients where already arriving, that was another whooping for sure. But then he saw the light streaming from the windows casting shadows that had not yet reached the floor and saw that it was early, the place ought not to be open yet.

            His father came from the backroom where they brew their spirits, eat their foods and slept their uneasy dreams, carrying his gun in both hands. People arriving out of schedule could only be outsiders who knew nothing of the rhythms of their small town, and outsiders where always, always bad news.

            “Who is it?” yelled the father from behind the bar. He made no motion to beckon his child to take refuge as well.

            “The very bad bitch” answered a young voice, a feminine voice, from behind the door.

            “We are not-to receiving anyone, leave!”

            “Not by the hair of my chiny chin-chin?”

            “Last warning before I shoot!”

            “Ok, fine”

            And then they really left.

            The day went on as normal. They opened the bar, a few clients arrived, some paid on copper, some with seeds and some with sex. The kid saw to his many tasks keeping the place clean (as clean as it could be, considering the occasional sandstorms) and the glasses full (as full as the could be, considering there was seldom any glass in the building without a chip or a crack) Some times a client would complain that his lips or cheeks were cut by the ragged edges of the glasses and then his duty would be to sew or cauterize the wound. The day went on and by the end of it he was exhausted. Like always. Ready to crash on his corner of the backroom and hope not to remember his dreams the next morning.

            Once father and son were deeply asleep the outsiders returned.

* * *

 

            The woman looked at the twisted and mutilated body the kid was hunched over.

            “Was she alone?” asked the woman.

            “N-no” answered the kid.

            “Who was with her?”

            “T-Two men, big men, strong”

            “Please, continue”

 

* * *

 

            They were wearing ill fitting suits, relics from an age past, which had many a tear along the lines of their muscles. Not all three of them, only the men. The girl wore an oversized black overcoat instead, so crumpled and folded to fit her measure that her frame was completely hidden and the only suggestion to her petite nature were her face, neck and arms, which poked out of the dark cloth like sticks out of an overstuffed scarecrow. She was blonde and she was maniac and she was Harmonica.

            A distrust of outsiders could be considered xenophobia in a long ago era, but now, when every stranger proved itself to be worse than the last, it was merely common sense. And she was the worst of them all.

            “Hey, hey, hey, buddy, look at me” she says, looking down at the father, restrained by one of the muscle-bound-giants.

            It is late hours of the night and they are all in the main room of the bar, illuminated by moonlight.

            “gotta ask you something, something important” the girl goes on. 

            The father is made to raise his face by a hammy hand.

            “Honest question, what do you think of these guys?” asks the girl, pointing at her two companions “it was hard for me to get my hands on them, and I wanted to take them out for a walk, a test run, you dig?  They are loyal, oh mirth! they are loyal as fuck, seriously, they’ll do whatever I say, get me a pony? They’ll do it, kill a family? No problem, cuddle with me at night in my sleep so my screams won’t tear my throat raw? Hardly a couple of complaints, I love them, but see, I need an outsider’s opinion, how does it work with the aesthetic? My posse, do they harmonize? Do we present a coherent picture? I worry about these things you see? image, after all, is all this world has left”

            He spits on her face. She raises a gun and shoots.

* * *

 

            Just then, the woman noticed a bloody hole in one of the kid’s hands

* * *

 

 

            “Any way, I was saying to these guys, I says, hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice reinvigorating fight right now? Like a good old fisticuffs? You know? A nice and sound fleshmashing? A rousing round of knuckle-sculpting? But, you see, I can’t fight with them! They are my toys, these big dumb gorillas, they are, and I don’t want to risk breaking them, not at all, so I says, I says, to them find me a sparring partner, mirth dammit!  Find me a pummel pal! Someone to fucking pummel bones with! And lo! Here we are, so whaddaya say, buddy? Wanna go at it? Wanna fight?”

            Yes, the father wants to fight, this is how men solve their differences; he is not going to let this spoiled little girl put her foot on his face. He has to fight because he has to defend his territory, assert his will. He is going to fight becau-a hit makes his face turn 117 degrees.

            “Buddy, wake up, we’re fighting here!”

            The big, burly guys had retreated to the walls and she stood in front of him, fists raised, smile wide, waiting for him. And he went, oh, did he ever went. He went to town, he lets go to his heart’s content. One punch, much like his son receives every now and then, to remember the price of a mistake. Another punch, much like the ones his wife used to take, before she could take no more. A third punch, just like the ones the occasional client would have to get, to remember that this place belongs to him and no-one stands out of line, his line, in here.

            This last hit was strong enough to throw the girl to the floor spitting teeth. That ought to teach her a thing or two.

            She looked at the pieces of her skeleton, laying on the floor and said:

            “Look mommy! The fairies will bring me pennies, right they will!” then she turned her face “why, is my turn now!”

* * *

 

            Enough.

            “How long ago was this?” the woman asked.

            “I dunno, not long” the kid was no longer crying but he looked even more empty now that his story was told.

            “Which way they went?”

            “I dunno”

            “I see”

            She, indeed, saw. She saw that this had been a colossal waste of her time. Besides learning that now Harmonica was employing a couple of thugs she knew nothing new. Certainly nothing that would help her chase down the maniac. Ah, but she hadn’t left long ago and so there was still a chance…

             She put her shades back on and walked out, without sparing so much as a last look towards the kid. Once outside she scouted the horizon, of which there was lots. They would be far, but she could look farther. Her pupils, both the sullied and unsullied one, ate away at the light of the dying world around her, searching, absorbing, leaving no stone unturned. There, three points, two big and one small, loosing themselves in the near-by desert, against the rising sun. She took out her third hand, the conduit of her will, not an instrument or a weapon, but merely a portion of it, for she was the whole. She was the instrument and the weapon. Cold deathly intent, cast into a couple pounds of iron and about seventy pounds of flesh and bone. She didn’t aim; she merely saw were a bullet was not. She enacted a small change in the world and now the bullet was there.

                        About three miles away Harmonica saw a small cloud of dust raise from the ground. A little afterwards came a sound. Oh, she knew that sound, it was one of her least and most favorite people in the whole world saying hi. Just look at the fucking pussy, still using warning shots, as if. She and her two companions kept walking.

            BAM-BAM! And now the shoulder of her left lackey was mashed potatoes, still as merciful as ever, golly the woman had lots to learn if she ever wanted to catch her. But a pound of flesh had been reclaimed and this merited an answer.

            “YOU MISSED!” she yelled with cheer.

            KATAPLUM! This time her right lackey lacked a brain and his body fell to the ground. Ok, now she was pissed, she liked that guy.

            “IM NOT GOING BACK, SISTER, YOU CANT MAKE ME!”

            BOOM-PUM-PUM, Harmonica was alone now. She turned, red faced and swollen, coat flowing against her body. She knew she was being heard, her voice was not being lost in the distance and the wind because she knew who was listening. It was her older sister, the adult, the assassin, the juggernaut. Distance meant nothing to her for she was greater, she was Telescopica.

            “I SAID IM NOT GOING BACK, NEVER! NEVER!! EVER!!!”

            Telescopica stood, three miles away with her gun raised.

            “EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!!”

            She saw where a bullet lacked.

            “EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!! EVER!!!”

            Telescopica pulled the trigger.

 


	2. Chapter 2

_“o may the emperor’s mirth last well over a hundred years!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last well over a hundred years!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last well a hundred years…_

_Or at the least for ninety nine more!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last ninety nine years!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last ninety nine year!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth…!”_

            And so went the song, counting down the years step by step. For many it was a quaint way to pass the time but for some it was a grim remainder that time on this earth was running down, that not the emperor nor his mirth could last that long and that the fate of the world depended on which ended first. The song was, of course, illegal. It was also being sung by some drunkard in the far recesses of the derelict apartment blocks through which the Foremost was walking down.

            The Foremost was not the highest authority, not by far. There were other higher and more menacing agents yet. The Inquisitors or the Rectifiers, for instance, the ones who came with torture and scorch as heir primary tools. The Foremost was the one who came before or after these. His job was to appraise and clean up. In theory he answered not to the emperor but to the people. He was not a tool of the state but of the citizens. He was the last line of self regulation before the emperor’s forces had to step in and take matters into their own hands. He decided if the people could solve their disputes by themselves or if the problem was too big for them and the situation had to be delegated to more “official” channels. Afterwards he was the one who tied all the loose ends that the government may have left in its wake. Because of this he was considered the “foremost” citizen. The pacifying hand, reaching to the authorities in gesture of reconciliation, to bridge the distance between the governors and the governed. I stress the words “in theory”.

            In practice everyone knew he was just one more lackey of the emperor, someone who answered to His-Holy-Mirth and to no-one else. Nobody knew his name, but amongst those who were courageous (or drunk) enough to call him by any less than his title, he was known as “Noble Jerry”. Supposedly he was some aristocrat whom, after the war, had climbed his way to the top, not the very top, but a comfortable and not very demanding place near it. And now he could be seen walking around the city, minding everyone’s business, in his impeccable uniform and thick rimmed dark glasses.

            He ignored the rebellious song. He cared little about it or its consequences. He cared little about consequences in general. He walked up to a specific door and gave a gentle knock-a-knock-knock.

            The door was opened by a grieving man, behind whom there was a dark room with dank, concrete walls.

            “The fuck do you-to want?” said the man with red bags under his eyes and nothing but a ragged wifebeater hanging from his hairy shoulders. Not hello, or greetings or even dobry vecer.

            “There is no light on house?” asked the Foremost in his thick accent, if he wasn’t going to get proper salutations then he was not going to dole out any.

            “No, why would there be fucking any in this country?”

            “Because ours is most glorious country and also because I specifically asked for it since I’m to come visiting”

            “Oh, of course, sure, all in the name of the Foremost citizen, let nothing stand in the way of his foot and our faces”

            “I am the Foremost citizen, yes, and, ah!” the old, dusty light bulb that hung from a single thread which was more spider wave than cable came to life “see? It was only matter of patience, patience is always answer, may I come in?”

            “No, as a matter of fact, I’m more comfortable talking to you here”

            “I’m not, so I will come in, excuse me” Said the Foremost pushing aside the man.

            Whatever he had just said, this place could not be considered a home. It barely qualified as storage room since anything that remained inside for long periods of time would surely end up covered in moss, mites and misery. This had already happened to the dirty bunch of clothes that served as a bed and the damp, cardboard box that served as a table.

            “You have as of two days ago turned into single citizen, yes?” asked the agent.

            The citizen crossed his arms, unwilling to answer.

            “At my discretion you have been given time period to grieve but that time is over, now comes time to re-adjust into society”

            “I am not-to marry again, not so soon”

            “Yes you are, no citizen may be solitary in our country and most important, no citizen may be childless, world needs future citizens”

            “No! I’m not going to do it! You can’t force people to be together, damnation”

            “The state is not forcing you to do anything, but be it understood that refusal to carry out citizenship duty is taken as tacit agreement to participate in government program of integration of outliers”

            The man’s demeanor froze in the spot. The shadows on his face growing darker. Nobody knew what happened once you got inside the P.I.O. only that no-one returned.

            “As always, citizen, you are free to choose, you are always free to choose”

            The man looked at the ground, arms still crossed. The Foremost produced a bunch of papers and a worn down pencil.

            “It is only matter of signature and suitable wife will be yours”

            The man took a deep breath and finally signed the papers, it is understood that the signature was not words of any kind; barely anyone knew how to make those any more, a simple X sufficed.

            “Very well!” said the Foremost putting the papers back into his uniform and walking towards the door “be proud that you have carried out your citizen duty! But I will leave with warning” added, stopping for one second “do finish, and then throw away, that bottle of vodka I see hidden in corner, illegal spirits are not allowed in our city, yes?”

            “How noble of you Jerry” muttered the poor soul, so low that maybe the Foremost didn’t hear it.

            “And do try to make sure new wife does not join rebellion or both will be taken next time around, ahoj!”

            As he walked down the corridors of the ancient building he heard a drunken voice chanting.

_“O may the emperor’s mirth last forty and seven years!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last forty and seven years!_

_O may the emperor’s mirth last forty and seven years…_

_Or at the least for forty six more...”_

 

* * *

 

“Ah! by the mirth of the emperor, my good friend came to visit me!”

            This impudent sentence was proclaimed by Hector, a cheerful black man, sitting on a small wooden chair in the middle of a cabin made with old corrugated steel.

            The Foremost entered the house with a shy smile. He shouldn’t be smiling, not at all, whilst listening to those rebellious words. “The emperors mirth” was seditious mockery, it implied that the fairness and well being of his citizens depended exclusively on his good mood. But instead of focusing on this he decided to point out the more technical aspect of the phrase.

            “Please do call him the Tzar, that is proper title and I would like you to respect at the very least that, yes?”

            “No can do, my friend” replied Hector with a smile where a couple of teeth where not “or else I should start calling you the Foremost citizen, eh my dear Czher?”

            “Call me whatever you please, but the Tzar is the Tzar”

            “Sure he is” said Hector, undaunted. “And what brings you to my humble dome?”

            “Same as always” said the Foremost, sitting down in the only other wooden chair that was in the room. “news from narrow world, of which you always seem to have many”

            “Indeed I do, and doesn’t it eat you away to wonder how do I obtain them?”

            “Not particularly” he was being honest; information was information as long it was accurate.

            “Well” said the black man, chuckling as he poured some hot water on a metal cup, that in itself was an extravagance, but the fact that the cup had herbs in it made it a display of wealth “as always, a myriad of old and new factions configure and reconfigure themselves beyond the frontier, I wont bore you with the details; more sources of water have been lost to the ichor but also new sources appeared, which in itself is a blessing and a curse, as usual”

            “I’ll make referendum about that”

            “And I’m sure all which said referendum will accomplish is that a few maps will change names here and there and pretend that the new sources are in fact the old contaminated sources, restored to purity by the tireless work of our beloved state workers”

            “Does it matter? As long as there is clear water to drink…”

            “Sure, sure, and what about all the land that is being lost both to the contamination and the formation of new rivers?”

            “I do not know Hector, I do not know” said the Foremost rubbing his forehead “These things can’t be easily solved”

            “No they can’t,” said Hector absentmindedly “after all, there is a crack in the world…”

            The government agent raised his face from his hand with a serious expression on his face. The black man looked at him with no little concern on his, realizing what he just said.

            “I…I mean…”

            “What other news you have?” interrupted the Foremost with a more businesslike tone, pretending he heard nothing.

            “Yes, other news, uh, well you’ll be interested in this, there was a new sighting of Harmonica!”

            He was interested.

            “The criminal! Where?”

            “Don’t worry, she hasn’t crossed the border yet, she is still comfortably within the limits of the other kingdom, but this was the closest she has gotten here yet!”

            “Where, Hector? Where?”

            “In a small hospital, near one of the settlements in the Voynich region”

            “Hospital?”

            “Yes, she had a small wound and forced the medics to treat her, after which she escaped with a couple of hostages”

            “Ach!” the man sank his shoulders and his mind into deep thought.

            “What is going to be the official declaration? Another treacherous attack from the forces of the kingdom of the dawning moon?”

            “No need for that, this did not happen within our borders” he was still thinking.

            “Oh, and I’m sure it’ll never will with our loyal army patrolling the frontiers and keeping seditious spies at bay” the black man poured some more hot water; he hadn’t offered any to his guest yet.

            “I’ll have to go, Hector” said the Foremost standing up “thanks for the information, new package of provisions should be arriving by the end of week, yes?”

            “Sure, thanks, as always, my friend,  good bye”

            “Ahoj!”

            The agent left the place. The man stood in his small chair, in his humble home, alone until people started to arrive from the next room. Children, seven of them and two adult black ladies, one in her forties and another considerably older.

            “He’s gone?” asked the middle aged woman.

            “Yes, he’s gone”

            “You were careless with your words! You shouldn’t have mentioned the poem!”

            “My amber, he ignored it, as he always does, the man has a remarkable capacity to not see what doesn’t suit him”

            “You’re pushing your luck son” said the old lady “some day you’ll catch him on a bad mood and not all the mirth of the emperor will help you then”

            Hector shook his head with an indulgent smile as one of his many children sat at his lap.

            “You see how I constantly tease him and he doesn’t answer, no, mama, he is not going to do anything, he is a wretched, lonely creature and would never dare hurt the only thing that he thinks it’s his friend”

* * *

 

            The man that drunkards and delinquents knew as the noble Jerry was walking down the streets of a quiet and grey city at a fast pace. He was in a hurry to have a meeting with the Tzar to discuss getting himself a quick vehicle and a trip beyond the borders. An excuse was not needed, he was the Foremost, intimate with the emperor and if he had a wish (and the emperor felt mirthful, he thought with a little guilt) then it becoming true was just a matter of asking.

            So Harmonica had reared her ugly face once again, ominous, no doubt. But that was not really what he was interested in, no. Sure, she was a twisted, dangerous psychopath who left a trail of destruction in her wake but there was something else.

Wherever she went, Telescopica was near.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

            Her body ached with cuts and tears and gashes which blotted her white shirt in red. Her black suit and pants only had dirt on them but were badly tattered all the same. She pressed onward. She had a mission. But to fulfill this mission she needed a healthy body and luck would have it that the way to mend her wounds also happened to be the way her objective went. She was going to a hospital.

            This was a different town, a bit farther away from the desert, a bit closer to the border. She would have looked for assistance in the previous town where she encountered the bar but it just so happened that most people there were dead and the rest too fearful of her not to run away when she got close to them. And, as always in today’s world, that fear was completely justified. As she walked to the tiny building with the ancient Red Cross plastered in front of it she remembered…

* * *

 

            Telescopica pulled the trigger and her sister’s leg went down under its own weight. No, she was not going to kill her, but this way she’d be too slow to run away. The woman started to walk the three miles that separated her from her objective. But as luck would have it her four shots brought the attention of the nearby town inhabitants.

            As she made her way through the plains, the curious townsfolk checked inside the bar she just left and saw the mayhem inside. They asked no questions to the kid, for them it was clear enough that the foreigner who seemed to posses gun-power was to blame for all of this and thus she had punishment awaiting.

            So they ran up to her, brandishing weapons, all improvised from articles that were never meant to be used as such, and screaming the bloody murder they believed were owed.

She turned and saw her chasers. Damnation, she had no time for this. A couple of warning shots were thrown. It is understood that they were a warning in the sense that she killed two people to warn the others what their fate would be if they didn’t desist. This only infuriated them further, and they were getting closer.

            Finally she had to admit that she had to deal with this situation before continuing. More shots, this time only to incapacitate, she didn’t want to make a massacre here. But the townsfolk had other ideas in mind and she was almost on their reach. Very well, may the moon guide her. She took out her fourth hand and made the grey-and-red dance of the iron rain claim its tribute. Some managed to lay their hands on her and whilst no for long at least they had enough time to leave a mark.

            Afterwards everyone laid in pieces, watering the thirsty plains with their blood, but she was not done. Oh no, now she was incensed. They had made her waste precious bullets and a toll had to be enacted. So she turned her back to the desert and went towards the town to claim her tax.

            Paltry boon she reaped from the impoverished place but she would find use for it. Everything had some value. But now she had lost her trail. No matter. If no physical signs were there to be followed she would have to follow reason, and this dictated that Harmonica needed medical assistance. She captured some terrified urchin and interrogated him about the nearest location of such a place. Then she abandoned the village, leaving it a lot less populated than it used to be.

* * *

 

 

            She entered the building. It was a strong construction from the yonder days before the crack, when things were made with metal and concrete. Yet the strength of the walls made no influence on the virtues of the purposes for which the place had been used lately, many of which were not healing. In fact very little healing was performed there at all and when it was it usually was the most superficial of wounds and ailments. The main economy of the place was fueled by the drugs that were given to addicts or peddlers as well by the organs of the desperate that were willing to use parts of their body as token.

There was also a third use of the facilities, though no price was asked for this. Whenever the elderly or the infant were too frail to sustain themselves, whenever the wounded or deformed failed to reintegrate to society, whenever the mad or sick where beyond simple assistance, they where put in here, usually restrained, sometimes locked, sometimes just left to their own devices to traverse the corridors, forever lost. To wait and hope for a quick death.

Telescopica walked down the halls and saw the walls stained with the plethora of fluids that the body expectorates when its health is compromised, impregnated into the paint to the point that no cleaner could ever remove them. And yet some of the stains were fairly fresh, as well as the bodies thrown every which way. This all spoke of a very specific tragedy, recently occurred. Harmonica.

Up to a certain extent she thought she had some of the blame for this, after all it was her wound what motivated the killer to come here. And yet her guilt felt like it should be heavier.  Harmonica had a fairly predictable pattern. To accrue resources for long periods of times so whenever she reappeared she could cause as big a mayhem as she desired. Quick successive attacks were not her norm. But such was the behavior of a wounded predator. When a tiger has his body unblemished he will limit himself to hunt other animals, since he is fast and spry enough to do so. But if a wound ever incapacitates him, the animal will be forced to feed on slower, dimmer creatures. That is to say humans. Telescopica feared that something analogous will happen here where her sister, instead of retreating to lick her wounds, will simply start attacking faster and dirtier.

            Pointless, none of this was helping with her mission; she had to restore her body so she could continue the chase.

            Finally, she encountered a woman, with a rolled cigarette, cleaning a particularly big pool of blood  with a mop. The woman noticed her and said.

            “What now? What now, I ask! Is it not enough with the hooligans and the thugs and the criminals and psychopaths that come at every hour? Begone damnation! Begone! That we have no more riches to plunder, for all that is holy below the moon! Let us be!”

            “I don’t come looking for riches” answered Telescopica “only for care of my wounds”

            “Oh” said the woman, dropping the mop, glad that she had an excuse to go and do anything else but the thing she was just doing “then the moon dawns on you, come along”

            “As it dawns on us all, thank you” replied she, following her would be medic.

            “You’re a believer!” Said the nurse, with sudden cheer.

            “I don’t believe, but I was raised with the practice and now it’s part of me”

            “Ah, the rituals, they help even to those whose faith is lacking”

            “They help me on occasion, yes” for example in moments such as this, to get the good will of the person who is about to stitch her up.

            “If only it could help the poor devils within the empire of Kratae, all that nonsense idolatry of their emperor’s mirth and such, it breeds delinquents like Karachay and others who then come and take everything just because they won the war all those years ago!”

            “Yes”

            They went past multiple rooms, each enclosing its own particular hell, until they found one that was empty. It had only a bed, worn down and so thin as to be no thicker than its sheets, but a real bed all the same.

            “Sit down here, let me see you”

            Telescopica did as told and took out her suit and shirt off, leaving only her bruised skin and a bra which was more wire than cloth.

            “Well the good news is that all the cuts are superficial, I’ll only have to disinfect them and bandage them, which is easy enough, here we go”

            The nurse took a huge metal flask and uncorked it; the penetrating smell of alcohol inundated the room. It wasn’t pure ethylic alcohol, such refined chemicals where far too hard to find. It was a spirit, a strong drink, something much easier to come across, even today. One of the first things civilizations had learned to do when all they had at their disposal was mud and stones and rotten fruit was to ferment said fruit and drink the resulting elixir. Alcohol had been one of humanity’s first accomplishments, it could almost be said it was its oldest friend. And this friend was going to stick along, keeping us company, until the very end.

            She endured the sizzling pain of the liquid on her raw flesh like she endured anything else, not with stoicism, but with detachment.  Then came the bandages and she was ready to go on. She got up from the bed and started to put on her clothes back, with swiftness but enough care not to disturb the bandages.

            “Now it’s the matter of our price” said the nurse delicately, as if afraid to anger her patient.

            Telescopica searched within the deep pockets of her suit for the goods that she had taken from the other town and retrieved some herbs she had found.

            “Should help to make drugs” she answered, matter-of-fact.

            “Oh! Oh! Fool moon to you!”

            “Yeah, you’re welcome; now tell me what direction Harmonica took when she left”

            “Can’t answer that, I was hiding through most of the massacre, but I do know of a couple patients who saw what happened, you could ask them”

            “Take me to them, now”

            “Uhm, yes, of course” the nurse didn’t sound too enthused about this.

            They went back to the messy halls; Telescopica noticed there was a lot more living people now, strung about the place. Rats coming out of their hiding, their fear for the big bad bitch diminishing, returning to their routine of aimlessly drifting through corridors scratching their punctured arms or the scars where their kidneys used to be.

            “Where are the other nurses?” Asked Telescopica.

            “Not here, sleeping probably yesterday was an exhausting day.”

            “You’re here”

            “Yes, short end of the straw, here we are”

            They were next to a room, near the entrance, which probably used to be an office, now reduced to only its walls and a window with bars. Tied to the bars by leather cords was a madman, muttering to himself.

            “…dreams of land and gold, land and gold, land and gold, endless endless, endless land and gold, endless, endless like doom and fire and wild desires of land and gold…”

            “We found him wandering near the border” explained the nurse “chances are he was a war prisoner or a traitor, he has signs of torture on his body, not to speak of his mental state, he must have seen where Harmonica ran away from his window”

            Telescopica doubted he would be of any use mad as he was, but she had to try. She walked into the room, the nurse stayed back unwilling to enter. The woman went up to the man and grabbed him by his hair.

            “Did you see where the woman that attacked this place yesterday went?”

            Lost, glassy eyes looked at her, a stream of saliva running down his chin. He wasn’t listening. She stamped him against the bars of the window and shot her gun, barely a few inches of his left ear.

            “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” the childish scream of someone who wasn’t too sure how to use their tongue reverberated in the small room.

            “What are you doing!?” yelled the nurse.

            “Now listen here, prisoner” said the woman pressing the hot end of her weapon to his solar plexus “you will tell us everything we need to know or you know what we’re gonna do to you, and this time we are not going to stop, we’ll just keep going and going and going, remember how it is? Remember how it was? You’re there again, back in the prison, now answer!”

            “Oh, that’s what you’re doing” said the nurse, and went away.

            The woman trusted that in his broken mind this was still something he understood, that this was indeed the only thing he could possibly understand anymore.

            “TO THE NIGHT, SHE WENT TO THE NIGHT!”

            “Need to be more clear than that, prisoner” she shoot the gun again and this time she started to slowly edge it closer to his eyes.

            “NOT TO THE SUN; SHE DIDN’T WENT TO THE SUN; SHE WENT TO THE NIGHT!!!” he was hollering, tendons becoming a harp in his neck, more animal than man at that point.

            “To the east, she went to the east” she said, mostly to herself “thank you”

            She left the man alone and abandoned the room.

            She walked out of the hospital, pushing aside a few patients who had clustered around the door, curious about all the noise. Outside was the nurse, looking at the horizon. The sun was dawning and there was no moon in the sky.

            In the distance a cloud of dust was raising and coming closer. Not a natural event, but something caused by men, men with vehicles.

            “The moon is not merciful today” said the nurse, a dry quality to her voice “those are bandits, Karachay most likely, it’s been a month since his last visit”

           Telescopica saw that woman’s expression, hard and unwavering; she saw a face similar to that in a mirror, years ago. Something which was not achieved by the attacks or the pools of blood or the torture she just saw perform by someone she just helped heal or by the promise of further, unending, tribulations beyond her mettle, but by the aggregate of all of that. She saw a woman who had been hollowed.

            She started walking away from the hospital. She could face the bandits, and probably win, but they would only slow her down and they were coming from the north anyway. They hadn’t come across Harmonica.


	4. Chapter 4

            He walked every single step in a stair that was as-wide-as-the-ocean until he reached columns as-tall-as-the-sky. These are not descriptions, these were their names. As in most self aggrandizing regimes, there was a tendency within the empire to give portentous, mythological names to everything. Every moment was of utmost significance, every stone was its own legend and every inch was meant to exalt the glory of the unlimited might of the Tzar. In this fashion was that the Foremost citizen had acquired his title and he counted himself lucky that it was not the most ridiculous one out there.

            He had a powerful distaste for this attitude of “every event must be cosigned to the history books as the ultimate one” for one, it robbed of any kind of importance to the moments and individuals that were truly exceptional and for the other, such gesturing was meant to exalt that which was in reality paltry and weak. But the Tzar was neither of those and so, he didn’t need all that dressing.

            The Tzar was powerful, exceptionally, immeasurably powerful. He was as great as one could be and so any make up and decoration only obscured the true might hidden behind. The Foremost wished for a more Spartan government, a barren aesthetic that didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was, for it was already titanic enough by itself.

            But the commanders and advisors and what not insisted on all the fanfare and disguises, this, they said, is how a true empire should look like! Banners! Statues! Flags! Phallic symbols every which way! Pathetic. They were afraid, they understood that they were not needed, not only that, they understood how monstrous and mightysome was the emperor by himself. They were not dealing with the common despot or the insane tyrant. This was not a narcissistic and easily manipulable figurehead. He was the Tzar, the monster who cracked the world and who now sat at the throne of the empire and verily all the decorations and rituals were a desperate attempt to make him conform to their preconceived notions of authority. A futile endeavor meant to box him into the category of just one more fascist leader, because they were familiar with that, they understood that. But the Tzar was greater and far, far more dangerous.

            As the Foremost entered the royal palace and made his way across the gallery-of-coronation and the hall-of-a-thousand-trophies he let the shadows and the quietness of the place relax him and wash away the familiar anxiety that came with facing the Tzar face to face. The palace was a spacious place, with ceilings that lost themselves in darkness and echoes that traversed miles before returning. So big it was that it almost felt empty, regardless of all the servants and officers that worked there, and this emptiness gave a feel of abandonment. Despite all its artificial fatuousness, the palace was as derelict as the rest of the world, one more building impatient to fulfill its role as ruin in a, soon to be barren, wasteland. Cracks decorated the architecture and piles of rubble accumulated on the corners. The Foremost liked this.

            Finally he reached the innermost chamber, the throne-room where the power to obliterate an entire nation rested.

            “Surozenec” Said the Foremost from the door.

            From the other side of the unilluminated room, surrounded by columns as wide as ancient trees (and this was not simply their names), perched upon a seat of stone, a dark, colossal mass stirred and two blue lights shone from its zenith.

            “I come with request” continued the agent, in his calm and thick accent “I need to procure vehicle to traverse beyond border, yes?”

            Something on top of the mass turned, making three long and sharp prongs that jutted on top of it turn as well, the dots of light focused fully on the newcomer.

            “It won’t be long, if my absence is too noticed send messenger and I’ll return instantly”

            There was a silence that could hardly be called as such since the dark, ineffable monolith was thinking, and so intense were its thoughts that cacophony could as well be drenching the shadowed room.

Finally a potent reverberation boomed across the chamber, across the palace, across the entire city.

**“ехать”**

           “Thank you, Tzar”

           The Foremost left the room. The giant went back to its slumber.

 

* * *

 

            The greenish-gray military jeep traversed the land playing no mind to the rocks and rubble that lay on the roads. The vehicle had no roof to speak of and so the already cold air was made colder by its speed, hitting the two passengers mercilessly. The Foremost wasn’t alone. He didn’t know how to operate machinery such as an inner combustion engine and so he needed a driver with him. The driver was old, old enough to remember the world before the crack. Unlike younger people he carried a general fatalism with him, a sense of defeat that was borderline catatonic. He was one of many like this and their compliance made them the perfect employers for the government. It is true that life was, as of now, better than it used to be for him about a decade ago, when the worst consequences of the war were still making the world suffer whiplash.

            The years right after the world was cracked had been an inescapable hell, where plagues, famish and death, death, death took upon the land. Children knew existential despair as young as six years old, brothers knew the taste of their brothers blood for the first time, a scarcity never before seen made human life just about one of the most worthless goods available. The oceans rose with the tears of all the mothers who lost their babies and all the babies that lost their mothers. Ravens and vultures grew fat and then they fell out of the sky from their own weight collapsing into hills of rotten bodies where they would flap their wings uselessly, trying to escape the stench only to become part of the decomposing landscape. Marshes were made with the pus and blood of the rotten corpses and people had to live on those poisoned lands from early childhood never knowing anything else. Flies were for some the only food available, eaten by the handful that could be swat from their dirty bodies.

            All of this was not necessarily a world wide phenomenon; most of the empire was spared from the horror. Hell broke loose only on one hemisphere of the planet, the one where the crack originated, the one wherein the emperor unleashed his power, winning the war. But all the same there were dire consequences from the emperor’s bane in the Tzars land. Resources became scarce as well, the climate changed for the worse, the fissures extended all along the surface of earth, reshaping continents and mountains, creating myriads of new rivers all across the world. Bringing in the ocean into shallow lands, and from the mix of the salt water, along with the countries worth of putrefaction that seeped into the ground, an ichor formed, which would on occasion resurface and contaminate the new rivers which where in their turn eroding the available surface.

            Yet when compared with the horrors in the land of the defeated this was a quieter hell, a more taciturn one. A colder one. Instead of becoming fat and engorged in dead like a body in a ditch, the country dried up and deflated like a mummy. And now only people like the driver remained, people like the driver and people like the Foremost, traversing the eroded roads towards the border of the country, going straight into the only other political force of note remaining on the world besides the empire. The kingdom of the dawning moon.

            The journey had been a silent one thus far. The Foremost didn’t feel like talking and the man driving hadn’t the will for it. The desolate fields ran past them just as silently, reflecting themselves in the dark mirrors that were the Foremosts shades. It was cold but not winter cold. Winter was no longer a thing that happened, only lower temperatures and humidity, no snow, no clouds, maybe the occasional rain.

            As their trip neared its sixth hour of awkward silence, the Foremost interrupted this with one simple order.

            “Stop”

            The jeep stopped, with its thick tires sliding slightly on the pavement, strands of rubber flying around. They weren’t quite past the frontier yet, but they were pretty far away from the conglomerate of urban centers known as the capital. It had been hours since they spotted the last service stop and the Foremost felt hungry. He came down from the vehicle and walked to the building he had spotted from a mile away.

            The construction was flat and thick and in a remarkable good state. All the windows had glasses, and paint covered the exterior. It even had a fancy sign on top of it marking the place as an inn. He wasn’t going to sleep there but he could have a warm meal.

            Inside was thick with smoke from cigars, lamps and well cooked foods. There were three tables where a few costumers were sitting, not chatting but merely existing near each other in the same place. Some people were eating food which looked decently appetizing. In one corner there was a small kitchen with about three different pots on top of a live fire. There was a hole in the roof directly on top of it but most of the smoke was dispersing around the place. In another corner were a bunch of piled up pillows which did the job of communal beds at night for the guests. The Foremost walked up to the cook who was crouched near the boiling pots and asked in his accent, almost as thick as the atmosphere of the place.

            “Do you sell food?”

            Some of the clients turned their faces towards him; the cook did the same but at a much slower rate. The crouched man stood up and looked at the Foremost for a long time before answering.

            “I know who you are; you-to are the Foremost, Jerry, the noble, the Tzar’s dog”

            “I am known by those names, yes, I do not like most of them, but I do not care, I only want food, do you sell it?”

            “And what would you pay me with?”

            The man with the shades looked inside his coat and pulled a bunch of papers.

            “These are emperor’s coupons, they are worth one license from the emperor to demand supplies to anyone, I’ll give these to you to use as you wish”

            “I see… but the problem is that we are mighty far away from the emperors’ mirth, and his authority doesn’t feel as strongly here as it does at the center of his command, in here these are just useless papers”

            “I understand, I have some provisions we might exchange back in my vehicle, let’s go take a look”

            “mhmmmm…no, I don’t kindly feel we’re gonna do that either…”

            A creak came from his back and the government agent turned to see everyone else stood up from their chairs.

            “But you see” continued the cook “there is something mighty valuable here that you can give us and that would be your right here persona, I feel there might be mirthful reward the emperor would be willing to give in exchange for one of his officers”

            “You think wrong, the Tzar would not care for my loss, it would be hard for him to replace me, yes, but he would still be the Tzar and that is all that matters to him”

            “Well, isn’t that too bad?” The clients were getting closer to the Foremost.

            “I said Tzar wouldn’t miss me but it would still be foolish to attack me”

            “Don’t kid yourself; you’re pretty far from your emperor’s authority or protection”

            “I do not need emperor for protection” said the Foremost, raising his two fingers to the side of his shades.

            He looked at where a wall was and a wall was no more. Absolute, devastating, irreversible destruction, just like that.

            Everyone turned their heads to the gaping hole that ate away an entire side of the building.

            “Consider this warning; I’m still willing to buy food” he still held his fingers by his glasses.

            The cook grabbed a pot from the fire which held a thick, creamy soup and just gave it to the man.

            “Keep you papers, just leave”

            Once the Foremost grabbed the pot the cook spat on it. The agent saw the mucus float for a couple of second on the liquid only to sink afterwards. He turned around and walked up to the exit but before leaving he said.

            “Good survivor knows to compromise and cooperate with those he despises, in order to stay alive, this hole I just made is going to let cold and illness in, you’ll be dead in a month if you do not leave, you do not know how to survive, I, on the other hand, have food to nurture me, I will survive” then he turned one more time before leaving for good “ I must thank you for being here and cook this food just when I needed it,  spasibo I do svidaniya”

* * *

            “Why lookee here my skraelings! It’s my dearest older brother Cherry!”

            “Karachay, it is good to see you” Said the Foremost without any emotion.

            The jeep had stopped again after a few more hours of travel and the reason for this was that the road right in front  of them was cluttered by three other vehicles far more in shambles that the Foremost’s. The amounts of rust in them made it look like oxygen and not iron was the primary material they were made of. They were big, far bigger than it was needed or reasonable. Menacing structures jutted out in every direction out of the cabin and they rumbled, violently shaking with every revving of their engorged engines, throwing dirigibles worth of smog into the air. The “cars” looked more like epileptic rhinoceros who had been impaled by helicopters. And on top of the biggest one stood Karachay, with gigantic pants of a cut so low that his legs resembled that of penguins. His brutish head had hair as long as his three days stubble. This was the emperor’s collector, he with the responsibility of taking the tax owed to the empire as war reparations, in reality nothing more but a bandit. The one difference between him and the Foremost was that he didn’t work alone.

            “Come down here, Karachay so we can speak face to face”

             “Coming right down, brother!”

            The young man stumbled down, negotiating his way in between the numerous spikes in his vehicle, with some help from his associates, until he finally planted his bare feet on the frozen road. From the looks of his open shirt which showed a bare pigeon chest, he seemed to pay no heed to the cold. He seemed to pay no heed to anything.

            “You have cut in your face” Said the older brother, this was merely an observation, it was not going to be followed by “how did it happen?” or “are you ok?” but the bandit answered all the same.

            “Some sultry bitch who wouldn’t play along did this to me, taught her what’s what, right I did” Karachay blew on the tip of his index finger as if this was a smoking gun “fat waste of effort that was, the hospital had nothing of value, well, except for the organs and the bodies, but those are always a given, sure they are, eh Brother, mine brother?”

            The Foremost tilted his head to see beyond the shoulder of his sibiling. Back in the cars he could see the criminals and hooligans, holding people tied up. He couldn’t tell if the prisoners were alive or dead.

            “Describe to me the woman who did this to you”

            “Egh, she was some fat nurse, what cares?”

            “Did she had a gun?”

            “AH! None that I could rightly see, no siree, or we would have it right about now, and speaking of which, we could use some of those you know, brother? You should ask Tzar to give some…”

            “Did you saw another woman close by?” interrupted the Foremost.

            “No, I fucking didn’t, there was no fucken woman nowhere in sight, now about the guns…”

            “Oy, there was another woman alright boss” interjected one of Karachay’s men “she was a ways of the hospital but there she was, alone like she was asking for a plunder, if you asks me”

            “YOUR ASS IS MINE BAULDER; YOUR ASS IS RIGHTLY MINE TONIGHT NO LUBE NO NOTHING SO GET READY, eh, discipline, cant get good obedient soldiers now-a-days eh, brother mine brother?” said Karachay in a violent display of mood switching.

            “Wouldn’t know about it, I work alone, but let your soldier Baulder speak, I need information”

            “And I need fucking guns, mother fucker, so how about a right by exchange of goods and services, eh brother?”

            “You do not need guns”

            “My soldiers do, right they do”

            “Very well, I’ll ask Tzar for guns for you as soon as I’m back in capital, and now, info”

            “SPEAK BAULDER AND SPEAK GOOD AND I MIGHT BE SOFTER WITH YOU COME THE SUN-DOWN”

            Baulder seemed unfettered by all of this and simply said.

            “She was going east, along the border, not crossing it yet as far as I could see”

            “Thank you” Said the Foremost nodding with his head.

            He started to walk back towards the jeep, not planning to say goodbye or anything when Karachay spoke.

            “EH BROTHER, I gave you info, and promises are all good and nice when coming from family but not something that can be here and now used, you see, so could you be so nice as to point out to some other loyal citizen who may be due to pay his tribute to the empire? Some place ripe with goods for us to claim?”

            The foremost climbed the jeep and sat next to his driver who all this time had kept his eyes lost in the void, not answering to anything that had been going on. The agent gave a firm touch on the driver’s shoulder and the engine came to life.

            “There is nothing on this road all the way to capital, I suggest scavenging some other place, now move your cars aside, please”

The bandit looked at his brother for a few seconds and then commanded his soldiers to do as requested.

            The Foremost went ahead, along the road, moving farther and farther away from the empire.

 


	5. Chapter 5

            Telescopica reached the nearest town tired, frustrated and stressed by a throbbing headache. Conditions extremely unfit for her to focus on her mission, the situation had to be fixed immediately. She started to look around for a brothel.

            Luckily this was a moderately big town, spread across a group of islands near the sea shore, like crumbs falling off a piece of bread. It was hard to tell where the archipelago ended and the rivers, which prodded the land like praying fingers, started. The closeness to the ocean made it so any ichor that may come from the rivers was more diluted than it would be further inland and thus it was a source of clean water, or at the very least water that only had to be filtered from its salts without any ichor on top. This allowed for the place to prosper, as far as anything could prosper in this land, which was not a lot, but enough to have certain luxuries, among which organized prostitution was included.

            Telescopica traversed the clusters of lands connected by wooden bridges without attracting many looks. A place like this was more accustomed to receive foreigners and travelers and their distrust of strangers wasn’t as pronounced. Finally she found what she was looking for. A big house, one of the biggest around, with scantly clad women resting against it walls. She entered into a hall filled with decorating cloths and incense smoke in the midst of which an older madam with a benevolent smile was waiting. Telescopica wasted no times on introductions.

            “Do you have boys, pretty, compliant?”

            The madam raised her waxed eyebrows, unimpressed by this display of brusqueness and replied.

            “We certainly do; in fact, I’d say we have precisely the boy for you, for a price”

           “Yes, sure” Telescopica searched her pockets and produced a few metal cylinders, empty bullet shells “there you go, copper, now give me a room and send the boy there”

            “Of course” said the older woman with pinched lips “first room on the left at the top of the stairs, you can have the night”

            “Good” said Telescopica, moving ahead.

            She climbed the stairs, bumping shoulders with the workers and clients of the place, trying to ignore the strong smell and noise of sweating, copulating humanity that impregnated the place. Once inside her room she saw a bed covered in what long, long ago must have been a pink blanket. There were flowers, likely plastic, all around. She couldn’t allow that, how the hell was she going to lay on that bed with all those ornaments on top of it? She brushed them aside, throwing them to the ground. Then, on one of the pillows she saw a sponge, probably to take care that no undue babies were made here, she needn’t worry about that. A good thing about the ichor is that it provided a good amount of toxic chemicals which in expert hands could be used for all sorts of purposes, spermaticide was one of them.

           She lay on the bed, trying to relax, let her guard down, just a little, for tonight; otherwise she was liable to snap. Easy, now, that no-one was trying to kill her and Harmonica could wait, no she couldn’t, never ever distract yourself from the mission, never, but allow yourself to put it on stand by, for just a moment, psychological maintenance has to be performed and if she can stop to eat and shit, she can stop for this, so relax, damnation.

            She wasn’t relaxed at all when the gigolo entered the room. She pried her eyes away from the roof where she was picturing how much terrain could Harmonica cover in one night and was slightly bothered by the distraction until she remembered why this guy was here. He looked young, possibly a minor, likely inexperienced but that suited her, allowed her to establish her own rhythm. He was wearing what seemed like a toga and nothing else. His muscles were oiled, she guessed it looked attractive, but she honestly had no eye for that. All that mattered was that this was a warm body to frolic with.

            “You, get naked and come here” she said, while getting naked herself “do not dare speak, have fun, do whatever you want, trust me, I’ll do as much, but stay quiet”

            He nodded, looking at the ground. She wondered idly if he also worked with men, the thought was nice.

            For the rest of that night, she eventually managed to relax.

* * *

 

            The next morning, stress came back.

            Before she even opened her eyes noise intruded in her consciousness, waking her up. From the window came a commotion. She jumped out of the bed completely by instinct and it took her a moment to gather her wits and remember where she was. The boy next to her woke up, scared.

            “Oh” she said, remembering. She had enjoyed herself last night and wanted to thank the kid somehow “you did a good job yesterday…” she said, putting her clothes back” you have a good career ahead of you”

            With this awkward praise she walked off the place, ran down the stairs and left the building.

            Outside people were running, carrying carts and merchandise. This was the usual anxiety of the masses when a disaster happened, but she couldn’t tell as of yet what the disaster was. This had to be corrected. She grabbed a passer by who was hurrying with a giant basket of junk on his back and asked him what was going on.

            “One of the exit bridges has collapsed!” he said, preoccupation seeping through every wrinkle in his body. She let him go; she understood well enough what the problem was.

            In a city fragmented across multiple islands communication becomes a much more delicate issue than usual. Every bridge works as a bottleneck, regulating the flow and the rhythm of its population. A bridge collapsing is the equivalent of an artery getting clogged. Resources had to be diverted, routes had to be restructured and this all caused great interference in the routines of the people. Interference meant less income for the merchant, less food for the buyer, less time for the worker, and the want of any of these things meant death. And this was just one of the paths that lead out of the city, not one of the most frequently used. As soon as the bridges within the city started to get destroyed all hell would break loose.

            She saw the multitudes of people running down the street, desperate to reacomodate and she went the opposite direction. To the collapsed bridge. She had to push and prod her way there considering how thin the streets were, and the amount of people that was running through them. After much kerfuffle she went past the last desperate citizen and came to a wide street where buildings where few and far in between, past which there was a small booth, all bumped and crooked, and past that there was nothing but a ten meter fall into the sea waters. An officer of the law, identified by his silly hat which all people on his line of work sported across the kingdom, was standing near the border and she walked up to him.

            The bridge had been made of long wooden planks, held together by thick steel chords which were in turn tied to four big iron stakes, two on each side. They had been built decades ago and the cords and the stakes had become one single indistinguishable mass of rust. Now all that was left of the bridge were these same stakes and a piece of the cords, which were been examined by the officer. Telescopica kneeled next to the officer to examine the metal pieces as well.

            “Dawning, ma’am” said the officer, in a shortened version of the dawning of the moon salute.

            “Dawning, this was caused intentionally” she replied.

            “As much is what I was about figuring” said the man “and it was caused in just about the nastiest way it could imagine, look at this” he said pointing a the portion where the cord ended. It was sliced, leaving a perfect cross view of its interior composed by various rings which where less and less rusty the closer they got to the center. Yet in its very core the cord hadn’t been sliced but torn since a few long and stretched strands of metal poked out.

            “Whoever did this didn’t want to simply destroy the bridge, they wanted the bridge to collapse with people on it, they cut enough to weaken it and let things fall where they may, pardon of the unintentional pun, ma’am, many an important cargo of provisions coming into our town was lost and that is nothing to be making verbal jigs with”

            Telescopica paid no attention to the play on words, she was busy trying to decide if this was Harmonica’s work or not. It was destructive and nasty alright, but Harmonica was a show off, she liked being the center of attention and this was too underhanded and discreet a job for her. Perhaps, just as she feared, her recent wound was making her reconsider her approach in favor of more subtle tactics, though no less destructive. If this was the case her pursue was going to become a lot harder.

            “This is one damned of a criminal, if you ask me, no less than execution is what he’s getting when he’s apprehended”

            “Are there any other bridges like this in the town?” asked the woman, a terrible possibility forming on her mind.

            “Lady, there are nothing but bridges on this town”

            “But like this?” she insisted, pointing at the stakes “held by cords? Are there anymore?”

            “oh, I see your meaning, do not worry ma’am, this was the only one, all the others are good old stone, it would take a lot more than a saw to take them down, and good thing that is because I don’t see this being rebuilt any day soon, but do not concern your head with all of that, we’ll adapt, right you’ll see, we have clean water and that is just about one of the worthiest resources a city can have, the rest of the kingdom may be collapsing what with the empire at our back and the death of the princess but we, we will thrive all the same”

            As soon as he finished saying that came the unmistakable full body impact of a blastwave caused by an explosion, followed by the noise of rocks, tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down, into the sea.

           

* * *

 

            “We’ll have to wait for her demands”

            That had been the answer she received after informing the officer what they were dealing with, he said that and she looked into those eyes that from that point on and for all she cared, might as well be as empty as his head. He didn’t get it. She told him what Harmonica was going to do and he didn’t get it. Chances were that the only reason they were going to wait for demands was so they could reject them and then proudly proclaim that they “didn’t negotiate with terrorists”. Oh, harmonica was a terrorist alright; in as far as that she liked to terrorize people. But the thing is that this terrorist was not planning to negotiate with anyone, she was only going to cause terror and that was the end of it. And Telescopica was going to catch her and that was the end of that.

            One step ahead, that was always a good advice for dealing with an opponent, try to be one step ahead (or many, if at all possible) but since thus far most of her chase had been roughly on a straight line it had been hard to stay “one step ahead” of someone who already was ahead of her. But now they were enclosed in an area and Telescopica would bet her third hand that Harmonica wasn’t leaving until all the bridges here had been burned, which gave her room to work with. This had been a risky decision form her younger sister, she was chaotic, and violent and savage, Telescopica was the one who planed, the one who strategized, and this city, with its semi-isolated islands working as squares, had just became a game of chess. The girl must have known she had the disadvantage when it came to these kinds of mental challenges, so she probably had countermeasures. Or maybe she was that far gone and didn’t care.

            Now, it was pretty easy to guess where Harmonica was going to be one, or three or twenty steps ahead from now. Blowing up the last bridge and leaving the city, and there were only four bridges communicating the islands with the mainland. She only had to watch from a distance which one was the last one standing and that was where harmonica was going to leave.

            Unless she was getting assistance, and her last encounter indicated that this was a thing she was willing to do now. Damnation. This changed things, she was going to have to force Harmonica’s moves by only letting her one possible escape. This meant blocking, incapacitating or even destroying the other three exit bridges herself. What a pain in the ass. Where was that psycho getting the gun-powder anyway? It was already hard for Telescopica to get her own ‘powder for her weapons, and apparently her sister had enough to be blowing up things left and right.

            Whatever, figure things as you go along, get to the next exit, examine the three remaining bridges and then asses how easy to destroy they’ll be. If an insane maniac could do it then she certainly could as well. When she reached the next path outside the town she saw that this was the one that had been recently destroyed while she was talking to the officer. This complicated matters even further.

            So Harmonica was not planning to squeeze the city out by blowing up its roads one by one, she was planning to isolate the whole place by cutting all its exits and then either let it stew, like rats trapped inside a box, or to unleash whatever kind of hell she was concocting on the trapped population. Presumably she would have her own way of escaping the city, and Telescopica would have to intercept that instead. A third explosion shook the whole place. Time was running out.

* * *

 

            Now the pandemonium had begun in earnest. There were multitudes of bodies, not so much moving by their own accord but rather being pushed around, propelled by the other masses of bodies behind them, like water, spilling themselves across the narrow streets. And with this push came a counter push because nobody likes to be treated in such rude a manner, regardless of the fact that they were being pushed towards the only exit left. Though perhaps this was not such an irrational response considering that said exit could be blown to smithereens with them on top of it at any moment. Perhaps the wisest choice was to stay inside and try to catch the person responsible for all this destruction of public property? But by this point fights had erupted across the multitude and cooler heads were not to prevail. Except perhaps for the coolest, or shall we say coldest, of them all. Cold enough not to care about whether these people died or not and thus able to focus all the more on how to stop the monster that was hurting them. Telescopica was once again making her way across crowds, this time her job was made a little easier by the fact that said crowds, in their violence, had done a fair bit of property damage themselves, opening all sorts of holes, nooks and crannies to slither through.

            Her direction was the north of the city, where the wind and topography indicated the sea currents would turn. Since her sister was not escaping by land it was clear that the ocean was her exit, and the ocean would take her north, directly into the empire, where chasing her was going to become ten times more difficult. But to do that the girl would have to traverse the sea by boat. And bullets could put holes in a watercraft from enormous distances when Telescopica was the one pulling the trigger, no problem. So her hurry to get to the northern border of the town wasn’t all that great. At most she would have to swim just a tiny bit farther to catch her sister from drowning once her ship sank. Harmonica could stand to get a bit of water on her lungs.

            As she traversed crowded alleys, where the fights had started to take a turn for the gory (another example of what the emperor’s mirth had done to human nature) she was suddenly grabbed by someone. She turned, ready to dispatch whoever was that dared lay hands on her when what she saw made her stop. She wasn’t being forcibly apprehended by some brute out for blood, what was happening was that some teenager was pulling at her clothes like a kid calling for the attention of his mother. And this teen in particular was the one that gave her one of her most relaxing nights yesterday.

             “Can I come with you?” he pleaded.

            She stood there, dumbfounded, not knowing what to say or do.

            Who, in the name of the moon, did this kid thought she was? So this was what was left of prostitutional professionalism? She had been his client and nothing else, and here he was asking for a savior. Wake up kid, you’ve been lending your ass for money, you should know better by now. But then again, on second thought, Harmonica had been using assistants, she herself could use an extra set of hands and eyes, especially if those hands and eyes where familiar with this city.

            She pulled from her dark suit, so as to release it from the boy’s grip, and put a hand on his shoulder.

            “You can come but you have to help me, are there any docks in this city, any way to get out by boat?”

            “There is only one place to do that, it’s close”

            “Take me there”

* * *

 

 

            Telescopica was surprised by how much faster she was moving with the guidance of the young man. She was fluid when it came to traverse the urban landscape but this guy was downright gaseous. He moved through paths that had been totally hidden to her eyes, to the point that half the time she had to do a double take just to be sure he hadn’t walked directly through a wall. Her eyes were good, but they were good only to accurately pinpoint things that were far away. When it came to detect hidden things right in front of her nose she was as blind as anyone else.

            Finally she reached the edge of town, a cliff. A rather tall one considering most of the town was inclined, with its lowest side connecting to the mainland and its tallest one pointing at the ocean’s horizon. Whereas in the first bridge she saw that morning the fall was of merely ten meters, in here there were a good twenty before hitting the cold waters.

            Sitting right at the edge was what time ago must have been a complex contraption, something resembling a twin set of wooden cranes, jutting over the precipice, designed to lower small boats into the sea that flowed below. The thing was now destroyed. She came closer to examine it.

            “This was Harmonica”

            Of course it was, she must have destroyed this place before she even started with the bridges, after taking a boat from there and hiding it somewhere else to escape when she was done. A fourth explosion resonated in the distance.

            So that was it, this city was doomed. After the reverberations stopped she finally played attention to the screams that echoed all around her. Fires had started, possibly not even caused by her sister. Looking at the sides she saw that people were jumping from the islands surrendering themselves to the ocean. If they survived the fall, there were high chances that the currents would smash them against the rocks at the shores. This didn’t concern her, she had a mission to do.

            “Do you happen to know where one might hide a b…?”

            As she turned to address the boy she had to stop because he was suddenly a few inches from her.

            “Harmonica says she hopes you enjoyed me last night” said the boy before pushing her off the cliff.

            She fell, down, down, down into the dark waters. Oh, but she was Telescopica, and her yonder hands were faster than herself. Before her mind managed to form the word “betrayal” her will was already extended all the way out with its cold, empty, iron eyes looking at the boy. And before the fall ended two iron fingers entered his brain.

            Her splash in the sea was as hard as the fine mist behind his head was red. The city burned.


	6. Chapter 6

            It was a sad sight. It wasn’t an empire-town and thus it was not really a loss for the Tzar but it was a sad sight all the same. It had a clean water supply, a moderately thriving economy, direct access to the sea. It could have been something great. It could have been part of the empire. Now it was just wasted potential, going up in flames. The Foremost could still hear the screams of the trapped citizens in the distance. Telescopica, most likely, wasn’t there.

            Where was she then? wherever her sister was, and considering that Harmonica had been in a constant trajectory towards the empire ever since he first started to hear reports about her activities, it seemed that he was going to go back towards the border. He doubted he was going to be able to intercept them before they crossed into his land.

            “Keep moving” he said to the driver.

            As they traversed the land they could see exiles and survivors walking without direction, carrying barely what they had at hand the moment their city started to collapse, these where the ones who made it out before the last bridge fell, the rest were still there, trapped for the rest of their short, short lives. Many of these poor souls were cluttering the road, forcing the jeep to slow down. When this happened the refugees started to come to it, threatening to cluster around and the Foremost had to stand in his seat, taking air to loudly declare.

            “Please, move away so we can proceed with trip, we cannot offer any assistance!”

            “Help me!”

            “My home!”

            “My food!”

            “My wife!”

            Everyone needed something and the Foremost couldn’t give any of it, even if he had wanted to. He put his two fingers by the side of his glasses.

            A dry yet potent thud sounded and then there was a giant hole in the ground, right where a few seconds ago hadn’t been. A few bits of earth and stones that had jumped from the hole were falling back into it, sinking into the cloud of smoke that was rising from the place where destruction happened. Everyone around jumped, some for watching a portion of the ground disappear, others because they felt the strong quakes cause by said disappearance.

            “Do not make me use these in you” said the Foremost, still standing on his seat “please, step away”

            The crowd started to reluctantly back down and the vehicle proceeded its journey.

            This happened plenty of times and over and over the Foremost had to do a display of power to keep advancing. Until finally he had to do a full stop. The reason for this was a woman, close to middle age, brunette with plenty of grey streaks, standing right in the middle of the road. Unlike all the other people making their way through the plains she didn’t look lost or dazed. She stood in front of the vehicle, not budging one bit. She was missing an arm, and by the looks of it, not since long. The stump was wrapped in multiple tightly knotted layers of fabric in various shades of red.

            “I want to make a proposal” said the woman.

            “Step aside” answered the Foremost.

            “You have something I need desperately to survive, hear me out”

            “You can’t give me anything in return, there is no deal to make, move or I’ll have to destroy you”

            “NO! You Will Listen To Me” she said banging her stump on the hood of the jeep. “you may believe you are some soulless monster but though you threaten you haven’t killed anyone yet, I’m hitting your car and I’m still alive, so I must believe, because I cant do anything else, that there is a part of you that is not as ruthless as you think, and that part will listen!” All the other exiles stopped in their tracks, looking at the scene. The Foremost looked as well, betraying no emotion behind his shades.

            “I am listening” he said.

            “I want you to take me in you vehicle, I don’t care where, far away from here is enough, closer to a town if at all possible but I’ll take what I can get”

            “You realize that if I take you then everyone else will think they have chance and will try to get in as well, we’ll get overwhelmed and we’ll get nowhere”

            “Then keep them away! You’ve been brandishing those glasses around, use them!”

            “If you say so”

            He put his fingers on the side of his glasses again and turned around three hundred and sixty degrees. A minor earthquake and then a circular ditch surrounding the vehicle was carved in the earth, except on the road right in front of it. It as deep as a man. There was no crossing it or jumping it. This made it so they wouldn’t be interrupted by beggars.

            “That is not all” the woman went on “you will take me and three more people”

            “And what would you give me in return then?”

            “Nothing”

            The Foremost sat down again and put a hand in the shoulder of the driver so the engine would start up again.

            “WAIT” said the woman over the revving of the jeep “I’ll give you nothing because you’ll waste nothing! You are making the trip one way or the other! And three passengers will make no difference on you or your resources! Why should I give you something if there will be no expenditure to cover for?”

            “I have no reason to take you”

            “You have no reason to leave me either! There is no logic to account for here! No option that is more optimal than the other! Whatever you choose it would be merely a whim!”

            The car stood there, with the woman without a hand in front of it, the engine purring.

            “Very well, bring your two friends”

            “I don’t have friends”

            “Then who else is coming?”

            The woman looked at the crowd that was piling up around the circular ditch.

            “Whoever needs it the most” she pointed with her stump while saying this. “Her, for example, the lady with the baby”

            “Those are already two people”

            “The baby would be on her arms, that means there is still a space free”

            “I see…” the Foremost scanned the multitude as well “how about old lady, over there?” he said.

            “No, she’s old, she’ll die soon one way or the other, we want those who have the bigger chance of survival, the young and healthy”

            “You are not so young yourself, should not your seat be taken by a better candidate?”

            “No”

            “Why not?”

            “Because I want to survive” she said, still scanning the crowd.

            At this the Foremost left a smile escape from his face.

            “What is your name?”

           "Xandra"

           "Xandra what?"

           "Just Xandra"

           "Well, Xandra, i'm the Foremost"

* * *

 

 

            The miles passed away in silence, the wind making hairs flow wildly. Bumps coming from the poorly maintained road caused vibrations all through the jeep which after the first two hours could almost be considered meditative. The silence however was not to last.

            “So, the whole ‘noble’ thing, is that like a reputation? Like you pride yourself in being tough but fair or some shit?” asked the big guy that had been invited as the third passenger on that trip.

            “What are you talking about?” asked the mother who carried her baby in her arms.

            “That is what he calls himself, Jerry the noble; he is like the second in command to the emperor, he was the guy who personally killed the princess”

            “First, his title is ‘the Tzar’, second I am not second in command, I am Foremost citizen, and I do not call myself ‘Jerry’” said the man in the co-pilot seat, pronouncing Jerry as “Sherry”.

            “And also, I killed no princess”

            “Oh, ok, if you say so i'll believe you then”

            “Furthermore, ‘Sherry the noble’ is what people call me when they want to disrespect me, so, please, do not call me that”

            “Sure, sure, I wouldn’t want to be kicked out from the tender protection of your mirthful mercy or whatever”

            “Shhhh!” said the mother “you’re going to anger him! We should be thankful!”

            “Thankful! Yes, we should thank him! We should thank that he only had to be persuaded for a few minutes to do the thing that any other decent human being would have done by himself! Thank you, sire, for not being as thoroughly rotten as you could have been!”

            “You’re welcome” said the Foremost.

            “HA! He’s funny too! We should call him Funny Sheryl, or is that disrespectful too?”

            “No, but it is not true either, I’m not very funny” answered the Foremost with his typical dryness.

            “Thank you” said Xandra, she wasn’t smiling, there was no warmth in her voice, but she said it all the same “really, thank you for choosing to save us”

            “The funny man was right” answered the man with the shades “you do not have to thank me, you saved yourself more than I saved you, you are survivor”

            “You heard that lady? ‘u are zurvaivor’ that means you get to be treated like a human being!”

            “And what are you then?” asked the woman without a hand.

            “One lucky motherfucker, I guess, take care of me, that we are an endangered species”

            “Oh, there has always been and there’ll always be men like you, as long as there are men anyway” said the mother.

            “And women too, lady, do not be disparaging of the fairer sex” replied the guy.

            Suddenly a tremor, that had nothing to do with the jeep’s battered chassis, shook all the passengers, interrupting the conversation.

            “Stop” said the Foremost to the driver. The vehicle hit the brakes.

            The tremors kept increasing in intensity; the earth was a-quakin’. Not only quaking, shifting, rising up and down and a thousand thunders coming from the ground were deafening the people who were starting to get out of the car. There was a crack in the world, and now the fissures were extending once more. Landscape was being made anew, it opened up, the earth yawning and stretching all around them, crevices forming here and there like a million eyes, reaching for the survivors, reaching out.

            “Get in car!” yelled the Foremost to the passengers who had descended “You! Drive! Away from the cracks!” the exiles got inside and the tires skidded against the road.

            The driver, abulic as he was, turned out to be astoundingly competent at his job, dodging the newly formed ditches here and there with pin point accuracy. Yet the ground was becoming more unstable with every second and the fissures started to acquire the depth of canyons as they moved along, and because of that, horizontality was being lost.

            “May the moon save us! May the moon save us! May the moon save us! May the moon save us! May the moon…!” this was the prayer of the mother; everyone else was silent, too anxious to speak except the baby who was crying with all the strength his tiny lungs could provide.

            One of the tires lost all traction due to the newly formed irregularities on the road and the car started to form circles, spinning and shaking, threatening to fall on its side. Luckily it didn’t do that, it fell on a crack instead, face first, rear pointing upwards. The chasm wasn’t big enough to swallow the vehicle whole, but a good half of it was now below ground level, balancing on a couple of stones that had stopped it from falling all the way down, but still threatening to sink further at the least of disturbances. The sudden stop after the fall sent the big guy in the passenger seat flying off and knocking himself unconscious with the other side of the crack, falling over the hood of the jeep. The mother had braced herself and her child, hiding under her seat and now, due to the compression of the vehicle after the crash, she was now trapped down there. The woman without an arm had managed to grab the front seat before the crash and now she was badly battered but still in her seat and without mayor concussions. The Foremost was in his sitting as well, his head had been hit and now dizziness was threatening to take over his consciousness. He turned his eyes and saw the driver impaled on the stirring wheel.

            The tremors where finally dying down and in the following calm all that could be head were the dying sputterings of the engine and the wailing of the baby. The Foremost tried to move around but he was still dazed, his shades were missing.

            “Hey!” said a voice “Hey, we have to get out of here!”

            “Kakiye…?”

            “No, no, don’t go, you can’t fall now, we need you! We need your help!”

            He felt something round and soft touching his shoulder and a rough hand giving him slight slaps. He willed himself to stay awake.

            “We need your power, you have to get rid of the seats to free the mother and her baby”. The woman climbed over to the front of the jeep “you do that while I take that man from the hood off the car!”

            “I…I can’t, glasses, I need glasses”

            “Well, find them!” she said while she walked through the splintered windshield.

            He bent down, prodding with the tips of his fingers the floor of the car. The baby kept on crying, which was good; it meant he was still alive. More concerning was the fact that the mother was silent.

            Once the woman was near the unconscious guy the whole car tipped a little further.

            “Careful with weight distribution!” yelled the Foremost.

            “I know, I know!”  Answered the woman, sliding her arm and her stump below the man’s armpits.

            He kept searching, trying his best to ignore the sound of straining metal, which indicated that the jeep was about to lost its equilibrium and fall over. Yet once he finally found the shades another noise started to come close, a much more worrying one.

            “What is that?” asked the woman, dragging the unconscious body across the jeep, towards the rear.

            “Water, new river is forming, we must hurry”

            New tremors could be felt, this time not for any earth quaking but for the unstoppable rush of water that was coming towards them from the sea. She started pulling on the body more frantically, without putting too much care that the man’s head didn’t bump with anything. The Foremost waited until the way was cleared and put his glasses back on.

            He looked at the pile of leather, foam and metal that enveloped the body of the mother, below which was the baby. His head was still shaken, but this was the moment he had to concentrate the most, lest he obliterated more than just the broken seat. He, slowly, put two fingers to the side of his shades, and even slower, he narrowed his eyelids. Concentrate, concentrate, forget about the pain, the confusion or the rushing sound of water that was getting closer with every second, concentrate.

            A cloud of dust exploded in every direction, the body of the mother was uncovered and revealed it self broken and mangled though not because of the Foremost’s power. He turned the body around and saw that the woman was dead, her eyes were looking at the sky, where the moon she had prayed to barely a few minutes ago was rising. The baby was below.

            “I can see the water! It's coming! Hurry!”

            He picked the baby and climbed out of the car. As soon as his two feet touched solid ground the jeep was carried away by the oncoming wall that was the sea stream, a new river had been formed. The man saw that the woman had left the unconscious fellow on the dirt, the guy was starting to wake up and was mumbling incoherencies.

            “And the mother?” asked Xandra.

            “Dead, do you have food?”

            “No”

            “Do you have water? Any kind of nutrients?”

            She shook her head, this time more slowly.

            “The nearest town is a day and a half away from here, _we_ might make it”

            She looked at him, muscles in her face sagging, she understood who that “we” was not including.

            “But…the river…we could give him..."

            “Salt water, and we have no way of purifying it, had purifier with me on jeep but now it’s gone”

            “But…”

            “Can you take care of this baby? Honest question, are you capable?”

            “No, but…”

            “Neither can I”

            He looked down and the baby was no more.

            The woman gasped, trying to cover her mouth with her hands, forgetting that one of them didn’t exist anymore either. They stood there for a couple of seconds, the water rushing behind them as the only sound in the plains.

            “Just so you know, I’m alive and well, so no need to disintegrate me too” said the man who had been on the ground, standing up. He shook the dirt of his clothes and stumbled around, blood flowing in and out of his head.

            “We must keep walking” said the Foremost, turning around and following the flow of the river “night is going to set in soon and coldness will come”.

            “And what then? If one of us catches hypothermia or something you’ll evaporate us as well? Or just the frostbitten limb? Or maybe just the head and keep the rest as food? You know, all in the name of ‘surviving’”

            The Foremost didn’t stop as he answered.

            “What I did to the baby was mercy, but if you happen to fall ill of injured then do not worry, you shall receive none of it”

            “Lucky me” the man said as he started following the Foremost “and what about you lady? You coming?”

            The woman with the stumped arm started to walk as well.

 


	7. Chapter 7

            “For you see, my daughter, a king should think of himself as a mentor, a shepherd, a worker, without him his peasants would be lost to a godless world, learn this, child that you are, there is civilization, and beyond, only the storm…”

            “Yes, father”

Water was rushing.

            “…Yet one should not think of how heavy is the crown, responsibilities are not shackles, they are the natural order of this world, and when they are not attended we feel their weight in our hearts, the hole that aches to be filled, the machinery of civilization crying for its missing cog…”

            “Yes, father”

Water was rushing against.

            “…Nothing is more universal than the feeling of being an outsider, the feeling of not belonging, that feeling is the truth shining down your soul, nature telling you that your responsibilities are not being fulfilled, peace of mind comes when knowing we are doing the right thing and nothing but the right thing…”

            “Yes, father”

Water was rushing against rocks.

            “…We all must do our job, the King is no exception, in fact to the King this applies more than to anyone else, noblesse oblige, my daughter, noblesse oblige, royalty must fulfill it’s duties, and the world will keep turning”

            “And what happens if one does not fulfill its resp…repson…responsabilitees?”

            “Then one ends up as your sister did”

            Water was rushing against rocks, and she was rushing with it. Telescopica opened her eyes for one second, bearing the full sting of the salty water and then started swimming. The current was unyielding, the rocks even more, but her body, her body was fluid. Her body could fold and twist and flow. She was swift, she was soft, and she was slick. The rocks were merciless all the same. She collided and then, ignoring all her instincts that were telling her to stay away from the rocks since they were the source of her pain, she grabbed. She held, tooth and nail, to the stone that had just battered her body and then she started to climb. Inch by inch, gash by gash, she crawled out of the water and into the beach, dripping blood. Finally, once she stood far away enough from the river, she vomited what little of it she was holding in her lungs and then collapsed on the boulders of the place.

* * *

 

            “Is she fucken dead? Mirthdamit Baulder, cant you do anything right, for fuck’s sake?”

            Telescopica opened her eyes; the first thing she noticed was that she no longer had her glasses with her. She tried to cover the scar across her eye with her hand but the extremity was numb behind the weight of her body. She only managed to stir a little which awakened a plethora of aches all across her nerves.

            “Nah boss, she ain’t dead no how, she only be sleepin”

            “Well, fucking bring her to us, buddy, what are you waiting for, loose-ass?”

            She sensed a body approaching, her instincts tried to kick in and put her in a more guarded position, preferably with her third hand extended but in her current state all she managed was a wobbly stance and a shaking arm pointing a wet, and therefore useless, gun. Still, she achieved this with a remarkable speed from lying on the ground unconscious, and the man who was nearing stumbled back.

            “BAHAHAHAHAHA” said someone else from a distance “YOU FUCKING IDIOT, LOOK AT YOU ALL SCARED AND SHIT, BOO! AHAHAHAHAHA”

            Telescopica focused her eyes (still uncovered) on the source of the laughter. It was a brutish young man, with a shaved head and a shadow of stubble, dressed as a depressed clown, though his current emotions were anything but. She kept pointing her weapon on the chance that they might not notice it was compromised.

            In front of her were three mechanical monstrosities with even uglier men inside of them, catty and garish in all their pointless additions to their basic structure, there just to make themselves more menacing looking. It took her a while to realize those things where supposed to be used as a mean of transportation. The fact that they were pouring gallons of smog into the air gave her a clue.

            “She’s got a gun boss!” said one of the men in leather inside the contraptions.

            “Good for her!” answered the ugly man “my brother knows we could use some! Oh, wait, are you, golly, are you ever suggesting we should take them and use them ourselves? Why, gee wilikers, fucko, never in a million billion years would I have thought of such a plan! You know, sometimes I don’t even know why you are not the boss and I but a simple slave to your whims!”

            “Neither do I boss” answered the mook, with dry wit.

            “Nice, nice, very nice, so nice in fact that I think that merits a ride in the old bratwurst tonight, no lube, how’s that sound?”

            “If you say so boss” said the lackey shrugging.

            “That’s the spirit, now, as for you, lady, what say you to becoming a donor and save a life? Our lives specifically, by getting us money to buy food in exchange of your organs? It doesn’t have to be painful, heck, it doesn’t even have to be voluntary!”

            Telescopica stood there, gun extended, thinking of her chances. She couldn’t really tackle all these guys on her own, not with her third and fourth hands in their current condition. She considered jumping back in the river, they would probably chase her and the rocks would smash her again, but it was a better option than to escape by land.

            “Oh, I see your weapon!” went on the crazy man “wanna see mine?”

            He put his right hand inside his pants, firmly grabbing the crotch area, only to whip out his hand again, this time with the index finger pointing, like a pistol. He pointed at Telescopica.

            “Eh, boss, there will be nothing of her left to sell…”

            “Baulder, you’ll be joining Fucko, and this will be your second night in a row”

            “Aw boss, it still hurts when I take a shit!”

            “Then you shoulda kept your mouth shut and not spoiled the effect!”

            “But she doesn’t even know of your power! She didn’t even flinch!”

            “You are Karachay” said Telescopica “Brother of the Foremost, with the might of the Tzar within your body”

            “Oh, so you do know me”

            “I also know you are a common bandit, a criminal, an organ trafficker and a sodomite”

            “And I and of those what would you say it’s the worst one…?”

            “What I’m saying is I know what you’re capable of and I’m not impressed”

            “Do you want me to do something impressive to you?” a not so subtle threat.

            “I’m not impressed because I know of a bigger monster, a mad psychopath whose atrocities dwarf yours”

            “And who would that be?”

            Telescopica swallowed, wondering how this particular bet would play out.

            “The mass murderer known as Harmonica, have you heard of her?”

Karachay stood silent, at the top of his car.

“She has just crossed the border, she is here, in your precious empire, and she’s causing trouble, she is stepping into your turf, into your territory, killing your victims and destroying your loot, because see, it’s not like she even wants to keep it, no, she takes what other people have and then instead of using it herself she just breaks it so no-one else can” She had no idea if this was causing an impression of any kind. She was trying her best at speaking his language; she was used to adapt her behavior, to speak in other people’s register and style in order to persuade, but this guy, for whatever reason was proving hard to get a read on, on the spot, with all the muscles in her body distracting her. She could tell he was violent and chaotic, but how prideful he truly was? How calculating? How much did he care about things such as territories and such? She kept going anyway.

“I know how to track her; I know how to find her before she leaves you without an empire to steal from”

 Karachay looked at her and started to descend from his vehicle, hand still stretched, pointing at her. He was sporting a smile, an excited one but also a slightly scared one, like someone who meets an exotic animal for the first time, not entirely sure if it would try to kill them. He walked up to her and put the tip of his finger inside the cannon of her gun.

“Mhm, see, I have heard of that naughty girl you talk about” he said in a low tone of voice, first time in a while he spoke like that “but I have also heard of someone else, someone not many people know of, because everyone cares about what happens when Harmonica gets to a place but not many care about what happens once she leaves, what happens is that some wicked bitch appears, hot on the trail of the other crazy whore, I’m talking about some real, tough as shit, ugly cunt, with a bad attitude, a pair of guns and an obsession to find Harmonica, and guess what, my brother, he has a mad boner for this badass lady, he’d really like to get to have a meeting with such a woman, now, you wouldn’t happen to know where she at, do you?”

“Does said meeting needs the woman alive?”

“As a matter of fact, yes”

“Very well then” said Telescopica, putting her gun away “here you have me”

* * *

 

 

            “Mom, what is wrong with my sister?”

            The older woman gave a deep sigh, her tired eyes closing momentarily before saying.

            “Your sister is a beautiful girl and a kind person deep down, she is also…complicated, she is a teenager after all and you know how it is at that age…your body doesn’t feel like its yours and so do your thoughts, your breast holds turbulences and dilemmas that you never had to endure in the past, and she…she has it a little harder than most people”

            This answer was not satisfying.

            “But why doesn’t she just do what she is told then? Wouldn’t that make everything much more easy?”

            “Oh, daughter, you’ve been talking to your father a little too much, what we are told to do and what we feel right about doing are not always the same thing”

            “I…I don’t understand, dad said…”

            “Your dad and you sister are very different people who view the world in very different ways, of course from each of their points of view the other is ‘wrong’ but is not a matter of who is wrong and who is right, it’s a matter of compromise”

            “Compromise?”

            “It means being willing to change a little to fit the other better, and expect the other to do the same for you, your father, well, he finds it hard to change at his age, but your sister is young, she will change a lot in the following years, and, if the moon so wills it, she will grow and shape herself into a…happier person”

            The girl digested this for a few seconds.

            “And how much will I have to change?”

            “Oh, Telescopica, my dear” said the woman, embracing her daughter “you’re already perfect”

            Telescopica shook her head.

            The memories, they were coming back, they always did when she was inactive for long. Whenever her mission was not being fulfilled, whenever it wasn’t consuming every inch of her thoughts, the past returned making her bear its weight. And so when that happened the only solution was to put even more energy into the mission, to push harder, to refine herself further until there was nothing left but the drive. No past, no memories, no nothing but the instrumentality of her will. At the moment this was proving difficult, tied up as she was, inside the bandit’s car.

            The noise was deafening, she understood why these guys seemed to communicate only by yelling, their hearing had to be in shambles after years of this. It wasn’t just the sound of the engine, which in itself was loud enough, but also the vehicles rattled, way more than they should have from just the irregularities of the road. It was as if the sheer mechanical power of the fuel injected explosions was too great to be contained and made the entire structure shiver, causing ceaseless pain on all Telescopica’s bruises and a constant pouring of rust specs falling everywhere inside. Her blonde hair soon became tainted with brown specs.

            “THERE’S-A ONE AHEAD ON THE ROAD!” yelled one of the criminals, Karachay answered with just a guttural holler that might have meant anything. He came up through the roof of his car and pointed his finger at a small animal that was crossing the route many a meter in front of them.

            “Bang” a piece of the concrete near the creature exploded, causing a small indentation. The creature fell to the ground and curled up in itself, terrified.

            “Bang!” another portion of the asphalt blew up, the animal was shaking.

            “FUCKING BANG GODDAMIT, BANG!” the animal exploded into a ball of gore.

            “NICE!” yells of approval came from all the vehicles, which were now colliding with each other trying to be the one that would pass over the dead creature.

            Karachay came down from the roof and looked at Telescopica, who was sporting a mighty wrinkle in her lips and nose.

            “What? You don’t like the use I make of my powers, toots?”

            “I don’t like your aiming” she answered “it’s a pitiful display for someone who prides himself in killing things by shooting at them”

            “Aw, you heard that boss? She don’t like your aiming!” said the guy called Fucko.

            “Oh, sweetie” said the nearly bald man, crouching his face and breath a few inches from hers “this is not for aiming” he put his index finger against her cheek “not when you have the amount of fire power I have, now this on the other hand” he put her gun against her other cheek, pressing a little too hard the inner mouth against her teeth “this is for aiming and what good a use I’ll be doing with it!”

            “You might have cleaned it but the bullets inside are still useless”

            “Oh shit, oh fuck, oh snap, I hadn’t thought of that! Goodness gracious, what a silly billy am I! hey, Fucko, aren’t I a silly billy?”

            “The silliest, boss”

            “But wait! What do we have in here!?” Karachay said as he grabbed Telescopica by the hair and pushed her head against a giant metal box at the back of the car, which rattled just as much as anything else there. The man opened the box and within it she could see piles upon piles of bullets, shiny and glistening in all their gun-powder malice, tinkling against each other with delicate beauty.

            “These are all about to be lost” Telescopica said, barely putting any emotion in her voice.

            “Why? You think you gonna steal them?”

            “No, the rattling is going to set them off any moment now, they’ll start exploding if they keep hitting each other like this”

            Karachay looked at her considering what she just said, then he closed the box and made her sit on top of it.

            “Then you better hope that don’t happen or that the box can resist it”

            “Where did you come across all these anyway?” she asked, not concerned.

            “An old military base buried about a hundred miles from here” answered one of the mooks whose name she didn’t knew.

            “Abandoned? I thought all those bases had been used as refuges after the war, the people hidden there don’t let anyone come close”

            “Well, it was abandoned once the boss was done with it”

            Karachay let out a wide and proud smile at this.

            “And you only got bullets?”

            “Yes, well, let’s say most of the place blew up for mysterious reasons, taking all its treasures with it, we could only salvage this box”

            “And now you want weapons”

            “And now I HAVE a weapon, though yes, we could use more, that is where you come in”

            “And you only want them because you happen to have bullets?”

            “Hey, you know what they say, when you have a nail, you go look desperately for a hammer, right?”

            “Right”

            “So sit tight” he said, moving away, back into the roof of his car “and hope none of my bullets takes your virginity, HA!”

            “Well, someone has to and I figure none of you will” she said, completely deadpan.

            “HA! Good one, I like you, my brother has a good eye, unlike you I guess, HA!”

            Yeah, that’s right. Get all chummy, let your guard down, asshole. And forget about the fact that you didn’t search me and I still have my fourth hand hidden with me. Its bullets may be wet but don’t worry, I know where to get more.

* * *

 

 

            “Daughter, please stop” Telescopica was hitting a life sized doll of a person with her hands, her elbows, her knees, her feet, with every part of her body that could damage someone else.

            “She’s not done yet” said the father.

            “You can’t pressure her like this Johanns!”

            “I’m not pressuring her into nothing; she has chosen this path herself, again, Telescopica”

            “Yes father” she was panting, sweating, her body ached but she was not done, she was not good enough yet.

            The training had been going on for months now, survival, fighting, weapons, she was learning it all. She needed to be stronger, stronger than her sister, who now was gone.

            “You’re going to hurt her! And I’m not talking just of the pains of the flesh; I’m talking about her mind, her soul! You’re going to twist her into a crooked thing”

            “Maybe then she’ll be able to survive in this world, you need to go faster Telescopica”

            “Yes father”

            “Listen how she responds!” went on the mother “she is not even listening to me trying to interject for her well being, she just answers you ‘yes father’ like a…like a…”

            “Like a soldier” provided the father.

            “Like a slave!”

            “Like a survivor” said Telescopica.

            “Concentrate in your training; do not participate in this conversation between adults”

            “Yes father”

            “Daughter, please, rest, stop doing this to yourself, your sister has left us, yes, but you are not going to end up like her!”

            Her current routine was a series of fast interlocking moves, she was training her body so that she could quickly switch from one attack position to the next, chaining multiple different attacks in multiple different combinations.

            “Do you not see that your father is doing to you what he was doing to her?” pleaded the woman, her voice raising to the pitch of desperation, aware that her arguments were not getting through “now the result is a lot worse, because now he is succeeding and if you break like she did you’ll end up ten times the monster she was!”

            Telescopica quickly turned her gaze towards her mom, in the momentum of that gesture her entire body turned along with it and suddenly she was a few steps away from the older woman, her hands ready to mangle and break whatever they came across.

            Before her hands could even graze her mother something struck her in the face. Bits of skin flew away and she fell, leaving a trail of blood as she skidded in the floor.

            “Do Not Strike Your Mother” said the father, cleaning the blood from his hand. “Misguided as she is, she is right about something, I will not let you become like your sister, is that understood?”

            “Yes father” she stood, back straight, letting the blood fall into her clothes.

            “Go to the nursery, clean yourself up and then we’ll proceed with the training”

            “Yes father” she left the place, walking past her mother without looking back.

            Later, after being stitched, after the training and after a meager dinner she went to the bathroom and saw herself in the mirror. She saw someone hollow. ‘good’ she thought. A hollow vessel cannot be plundered.

Many years later a voice said.

            “WAKE UP!”

            Telescopica went back to the present.

            In a long life of remarkable feats, by far the biggest accomplishment had been managing to fall asleep inside the deafening cacophony that was the bandit’s vehicle. Her body still hurt and all her joints where stiff yet the moment of rest had helped a little, if nothing else, to clear her head. She tried stretching as best as her ties let her but in the middle of this the car stopped rock solid. The effect wasn’t much different from a crash and she went tumbling forward to hit face first in the driver’s seat.

            “WE ARRIVED!” continued Karachay, apparently unaffected by the whiplash. There weren’t a lot of brains to scramble inside of him, thought Telescopica. She stood up as best as she could in the small compartment of the vehicle and saw that outside, a metal tower pierced the sky. Bits of wire and other assorted materials hung from the highest echelons of it, like threads flowing in the wind. The thing was full of nests and the shit from the nest’s residents. She knew what it was, a relic from ages past, an antenna.

            “You stay in the car! And you, Farley, Fucko, stay with her and make sure to properly whack her if she does anything funny!”

            “Sure boss” said the man who had been driving the car Telescopica had been kept in.

            Karachay and the rest went into a squat building right under the metal tower.

            They were left alone in the middle of the desert.

Telescopica inside the car, the man called Farley outside peeing and Fucko watching his friend pee, right next to the car entrance, blocking her only exit. Ok, now was the time to act.

She stood up as tall as she could inside the car and yelled.

            “Hey  Fucko!”

            The alleged turned to see her and she did a complex maneuver, akin to a reverse somersault and she kicked the guy straight in the stomach making him fall into the ground. She fell as well but through her training she knew how to rise up in a fraction of a second. Once on her feet she came out the car landing on the guy’s knees, which was still on the ground. She didn’t merely stomp on his joints, she grinded them against the flat of the earth making sure no solids where left beneath her shoes. Once that was finished she walked a couple of steps and proceeded to break his nose, jaw and cheekbones with her heel. The other guy, Farley, saw all this and went running up to her, his dick still out.

            “Your father is badly hurt, we don’t know if he’ll make it” her mother said.

            She shook her head, no time for memories now.

            The guy was running at her trying to tackle her. Let him try.

            She positioned her left leg so it could have enough traction to support twice her weight and when he pounced on her she extended her right leg to meet the idiot’s face. But she didn’t just let the guy collide against the sole of her foot. She connected with his forehead and redirected all of his momentum to the floor so he ended up scratching his face against the gravel, her full weight standing on the back of his head. She then stomped some more. The two guys were out of commission and she was barely agitated.

            “Harmonica did this, and she ran away, she’s not in her room, she’s not in the city, no-one knows where she went” the voice of her progenitor was as clear and sharp as the day she first heard her say those words. She shook her head again, trying to get rid of the ghosts. She wasn’t done yet.

            Her hands were still tied up. She rested against the floor of the vehicle contorting, pushing her arms against her lower back, trying to separate her wrist from each other as far as they could go, letting the wires dig into her flesh until her arms went beyond her ass and then she just had to slip her legs between them. Now her hands were in front of her. They were still tied up, but much more manageable.

            She went up to the box where the bullets were and clumsily loaded the second weapon they hadn’t taken from her. Karachay and the others were coming out from the building by this point.

            “She…she hurt a lot of people on her way out, she…” the voice she was still remembering choked up a little.

            “Don’t worry mom, I’ll go get her” that had been her answer.

            She had her gun and they had nothing but Karachay who stood next to the metal tower, looking at the scene incredulous. She jumped into the driver’s seat. After hours of seeing the bandits operate those contraptions it was not hard to piece together how to do it herself.

            The woman briefly considered shooting at them, if not for revenge at least to make sure they wouldn’t chase her but then the nearly bald man extended his hand. No. He had way more fire power and while she would need multiple shots to kill them all he only needed to exert his will once. Next time perhaps.

            Telescopica jumpstarted the engine and accelerated as much as she could.

            “But…NO! You can’t do that, my daughter! Please, the world out there is dangerous and filled with monsters and your sister seems intent in joining them! Please, I don’t want to loose my last remaining daughter”

            She couldn’t be thinking about that now.

            “Mother, I will get her back, we can’t let her go out and keep causing destruction under our name, she is our responsibility”

            “You will die!”

            ‘Well, mother’, Telescopica thought as she pressed the pedal and explosions occurred all around her, caused by Karachay’s aming, ‘I ain’t dead yet’

            But that hadn’t been what she answered back then. Instead she just looked at her mom with pity, knowing that unlike her, her mother hadn’t found a true purpose in life. But this, this is what she was supposed to do. This is what finally gave sense to it all, what finally justified all the years of exertion and pain and suffering. All the years where she looked at the world and herself and found both lacking. This was what finally would fill that void that had been with her ever since the day she was born, just like her father had promised. This was her responsibility. Her mission.

            “Good bye mother” she left her home and her city and her kingdom and went after her sister.

            She would never see her mother again.


	8. Chapter 8

            Soft, dry, tired steps approached the small village. They had made it; they had survived the freezing night, without water, without food. They had finally reached something that resembled civilization. The exhaustion made them taciturn, their will was spread so thin that they unconsciously fell into imitating each other’s rhythms and so all of their steps were in synchronicity. Their walk generated a repetitive beat of crunching stones that got itself lost in the cold air of the morning. In front of them their shadows extended, preceding their steps with long, stretched silhouettes of their bodies. Behind them the sun was rising. It was the dawn of a new day.

            They entered the small village, it was in good conditions, as far as these things went, it had animals and that already was too much, but on top of that they seemed to have a windmill. The foremost lead the group up to the closest house, a small wooden cabin with some malnourished cattle in the backyard. He walked up to the door and told his two companions in a weary voice.

            “Wait here” The two people with him were too tired to reply.

            He knocked the door and did his best to keep his shoulders squared and gaze firm, like he did every time he intruded in other peoples houses as the Foremost.

            The door was opened by an old man and considering the windmill and the cattle, he was by far the biggest oddity in that place by virtue of his shining eyes amidst a concerned expression. This was a person whose soul wasn’t dead and rotten.

            “I fear I have nothing to offer, old man…” The Foremost managed to say with barely a thread of energy in his throat.

            “Hashem, young man! What happened to you? And your friends? You look downright ghastly, please, do come in, please”

            “Th-thank you” managed the government officer.

After saying that he passed out.

            When he opened his eyes again he was sitting with his head hanging low in front of a wooden table. A bowl of soup made of clay was steaming in front of him with appetizing smells.

           “Hey old man, I think mister jelly legs is waking up” said the big guy who had come with him, now sitting besides him, drinking from his own bowl of soup.

            “Where are my glasses?” asked the Foremost.

            “Sure, worry about that first, may you never be exposed to the peasants without your weapons ready” it seemed the man was feeling a lot better considering his irony had returned. “By the way, your eyes look really weird”

            The room was cozy, albeit a bit dark since it lacked windows. Still the furniture, ancient and worn down, coupled with the little trinkets and decorations that cluttered every available surface, made the place feel rather homely. From a nearby room there was amicable conversation between the woman and the old man.

            “Where are my glasses?” repeated the Foremost.

            “Easy buddy, your glasses are inside your pockets, we put them there after you fell face first into the floor, which was hilarious, let me tell you”

            “Oy vey!” said the old man, walking into the room “looks like you feel better, ja?”

            Xandra came behind him, holding her own bowl with her one hand.

            “I will, once I drink this soup, for which I am very thankful, yes” said the Foremost.

            “Your eyes look peculiar, I say, are you sure you feel invigorated?”

            “My eyes are always like this, and I do feel invigorated, how about you Xandra?”

            “I feel better, yes” she answered sitting on the table, without making much eye contact.

            The man searched for his glasses and when he took them out he could see that one of the lenses was cracked.

            “It was very unlucky but these old bones could not catch you in time I’m afraid” said the old men watching him contemplate his shades.

            “It is not big deal, I’ll find way to repair them, what we should discuss now is your payment, how can we repay you from the nourishment you provided?”

            “Oy, but its no big deal! I seldom get anyone to share anything with, company is more than repayment enough”

            He looked at the men who smiled behind his short white stubble, confused.

            “But…we have consumed resources, which you must surely need, we must replenish them”

            “Is no big deal, though if you wish you could stay here a season or two, I can always use a pair of extra hands to help me around with the animals and the garden”

            “That cannot be, I have to return to my job immediately, I’ve been spending too long in this wild chase of mine, but I can send someone to help”

            “Hum, you must have connections if you can send people to do this and that, listen, if you really want to do something mighty useful you could talk with the Foremost” at this Xandra raised her eyes from her soup and the big guy choked on his. “and tell him that our mill needs desperately to be repaired, the old stones inside of it are about to crack and break apart, just like everything else in this world, but it is not to late to fix them and who says how much they’ll last then? They might still be here once all of us are gone”

            The man with the shades put his shades back and simply replied.

            “I’ll be sure to tell him”

            “Thank you, with that I’ll consider the favor returned”

           A couple of hours later the three of them were walking to the front door fed and rested, accompanied by the old man, ready to continue their journey when Xandra surprised them with an announcement.

            “I’m staying; I’m going to help the old man take care of things around here”

            The other two looked at her with their eyebrows up.

            “There is no need for that” said the government officer “you can come with me, there is good job waiting for you in the capital, you’ll leave a good life, a comfortable life”

            Xandra shook her head.

            “I understand that you are making the offer with the best of intentions, but no, I’d rather not work directly for the emperor”

            He didn’t know what to say to that. Under the right conditions it could be construed as sedition, perhaps even downright treason, to refuse to do the citizen’s duty of cooperating with the state so flagrantly. Yet he was thinking about none of this. All he cared about was about how dangerous was the outside world and how he didn’t want that particular woman to be hurt by it. The best and safest option was to occupy a position in the government and yet she refused it, she who a day ago seemed determined to survive no matter what. Still, when all was said and done he understood perfectly well why someone wouldn’t want to work so close to the Tzar.

            “I wouldn’t mind a job at the capital” said the other guy.

            The Foremost sighed.

            “Very well, you can come with me”

            “Wait, really? I was joking; I didn’t think you’ll say yes”

            “You need the help, it costs me nothing to give it to you”

            “Wow! That’s…almost human, and how many babies will I have to kill in my first day?”

            “Seems like you guys will get along” said Xandra with a smile, the first one he remembered seeing in her.

            “Very well my munchkins!” said the old man “I think is time for you to go, and do not worry, I’ll make sure nothing happens to this young lady”

            “I’ll make sure of that too” said the Foremost, he was going to have to forbid Karachay from coming anywhere near this village, somehow “Good bye”

            “Shalom!”

            “Good bye Jerry, and good bye Maurice”

            “Bye old man, bye Xandra, wish me luck selling my soul to our mirthful empire”

* * *

 

                        The journey back to the capital went without any more incidents. They hitched a ride in a merchant’s trail, a road oft traversed by all sorts of traffickers, businessman and tradefolk, taking goods and provisions from one town to another, mainly with the capital as final destination, where most of the resources went. During the trip the Foremost and the man now known as Maurice talked some since there wasn’t much else to do.

            “So how powerful are you exactly? Like, how wide is your range? What is the hardest thing you could disintegrate?” would ask Maurice.

            “I am considerably more powerful than people think, I have not tested upper boundaries yet but they are bigger than the use I make of them” the Foremost would answer.

            “Are you more powerful than the emperor?”

            “No”

            “Are you just as powerful at least?”

            “No-one is as powerful as Tzar”

            “Is that loyalty speaking or is it actually true?”

            “Is true”

            “And how about the other asshole? Uh..Karachika?”

            “Karachay, he is not as strong as me, but he can concentrate on a much more precise area”

            “I see, so the more power the bigger area but the less precision”

            “Yes”

            “Interesting to know I guess, and for how long you guys had these powers?”

            “Since day we were born, that is how we conquered empire at such young age”

            “What do you mean young age?”

            “How old has the Tzar being in throne?”

            “Uh…I dunno since before I was a kid I think”

            “Thirty five years, but he is only fifty years old”

            “Wait, hold on, so he…he defeated…he conquered the empire when he was…”

            “Fifteen, yes, I was only ten, karachay was barely five”

            “But…how…?”

            “When you are as powerful as Tzar age does not matter”

            “Mirthful shit, the world was almost blown up by some teen?”

            “Yes, and a ten year old kid was next to him, watching him do it” The Foremost looked at Maurice and lowered his shades, seeing him with his naked eyes “it was the most glorious thing the ten year old had ever seen in his life”

            Maurice could almost see it, still reflected in the pupils of that man. If someone where to ask what he saw he would describe two children, standing next to each other, naked and squalid, with rough tanned skin from living on the streets, dirty hair, filled with lice. Still too young, still too rough on the edges, and yet standing by themselves against  the biggest army the world had ever seen, coalesced from many nations to stop what they considered an unbearable monster. And then the eyes of the older kid would be set ablaze and the light would embrace them, a titanic light descending from paradise and rapturing the world yonder their young bodies into kingdom come. And the younger kid, who would never admit it but until that moment had been deathly afraid, was scared no more, because here was his brother, making the world a better place, and the child would look up and see. And what he saw was the face of a god.

            After this, death and destruction would come and the longest odyssey through endless fields of dead bodies, until they could finally return back home, to victory and glory. But the kid knew none of this yet, all he knew was that it was over, and in that moment he simply uttered one phrase, with tears in his eyes.

            “We won, Tzar”

* * *

 

            “You are making a lot of demands for someone who has just lost so many resources from the empire!”

            It was the petulant voice of those who believe themselves in charge. A politician. One of the many officers and sub officers of the Tzar who crawled all across the ruinous palace decreeing this and that. Technically co-workers of the Foremost and yet to him they were far, far beneath the sole of his boots.

            They were all standing in the throne room, with the shadow of the monster looming over them, yet they played no attention to him much like flies who notice not the occasional wall in which they rest every now and then.

            “You left off for three days during which the rebellion has taken advantage of your absence to expand their operations; they are acting right now without shame on the streets! Then you return bringing some nobody villager saying that we have to give a job for him among our rank, you decree that this or that random town is perpetually exempt from taxation, and you demand, I say, demand that we re-structure our entire budget and government operation to accommodate the entire empire”

            “I just want to say, I would have come sooner, but moon was not in right position” the accused replied.

            “AND on top if that” proceeded some other officer, not playing attention “after loosing a vehicle, a driver and a water purifier, you bring nothing! The impudence! Nothing in return!” claimed another voice.

            “I do bring something” said the Foremost, completely undisturbed by all these accusations “I bring information, the criminal known as Harmonica finally crossed border into our empire, the amount of resources lost to her pillaging will dwarf those consumed by me in recent expedition by factor of ten”

            “Bah, she’s just some bandit from the kingdom of the dawning moon, we get plenty of those all the time, let Karachay handle her!”

            “She is not common bandit, I saw by myself how she destroyed an entire town alone, and Karachay is unreliable, by the time he takes care of her half the empire will be gone”

            “Well, then we’ll make due with the other half” said a third officer.

            How could have he ever been so blind to the stupidity of these men? He had always disliked them, on principle, they were vain and arrogant and utterly irrelevant. But now he saw the magnitude of their folly that they thought not at all of their futures or the future of the world. And he had done the same, he had to admit. He took a deep breath.

            “Leave” he said to the other officers.

            “We will do no such thing! You still have a lot to answer for and don’t you believe that just because of your position you will…”

            “That was no request, that was order” the Foremost answered, putting his two fingers by the side of his shades.

            “What do you think you are doing?” asked one of the politicians, in an extreme state of indignation “you cannot threaten us like some common thug! You are just the Foremost citizen and we outrank you by far! You think you can just kill us without consequence? Why, we should send you to the dungeons or…”

The man who said that stopped existing. Everyone else stood there pale and sick to the pit of their stomach realizing, maybe for the first time, how insignificant they were.

            “Do you see Tzar being bothered by what I just did? Is he asking me to stop?” nobody answered “then leave”

            The other men obeyed, leaving the Foremost and the emperor alone.

            The shadow had not moved during the entire exchange. He turned toward it and said.

            “Brother, I bared witness to destruction that cracks in our world are bringing to our land, they are no longer just blight of our far off and long dead enemies, they are present danger to what you built, on top of that our nation is in disrepair and dying with each passing day, soon it will all go away and once that happens we will die along with the rest”

            The darkness remained undisturbed.

            “We have to fix world, if not for others at least for us to live in it, we cannot die such miserable death as the one brought by our own actions, we cannot kill ourselves”

            Finally two stars kindled on the dark, peering over the Foremost. A voice said.

            **“REBELION, FIRST”**

The Foremost knew better than to argue against that. He was going to get what he wanted just after getting rid of the rebellion, which he didn’t disagree with on principle. It would be easier to coordinate the forces of the empire to fix the world if there was no opposing force getting in their way.

            “Thank you Tzar”

            The man left the palace, ready to make the world a better place.


	9. intermission

            Gury Yarimov, the last man on the universe, woke up.

            All the windows were closed. Sensory depravation was preferable to the same sickening view he had seen every morning for the last ten years. He got out of his tiny metal room and went to the control center of his refuge. He flipped all the switches in a specific combination that by this point, had he been of a different temperament, it would have the connotations of a religious ritual. But he was above that. This had been one of the first things he had promised himself, back when he first realized that his stay in this place was going to last a lot longer than expected. He swore that he might loose everything, every single thing in his life but he would hold onto three. And those three things he would keep no matter what, and he swore he would only loose them in the following order. Hope, Sanity, Life. These were a sort of safeguard for himself. No matter what, he was not going to despair, and if even, if things ever got that truly horrific, he was still not going to go insane, then some more, if, if, if, things were pushed to the terminus of his mind, he was still not going to die. Staying alive was priority number zeroth. And so he constructed two other failsafe mechanisms within his consciousness so before dying he would have to loose two other things that he could never allow himself to loose. This was all purely abstract of course, merely mental exercises. But they had helped.

            Staying hopeful and sane and alive had become a challenge, and he had been trained to overcome any challenge thrown his way. He was a hero after all, the hero of his country, the last one. By now he had more than enough practice. It was a matter of mechanization of behavior. Create a routine, follow that routine for 3650 days and your neural paths were rewritten and reinforced tight enough that they could never deviate from the routine. Today you don’t feel like getting out of bed? Get out of bed all the same, you have been doing it for years and by this point the sheer inertia of the past will push you out. Don’t feel like taking care of the air purifiers? Do it all the same, you’ve doing it for years and by now you can do it with your eyes closed. Don’t feel like eating or drinking or staying alive? Do it all the same, even if it hurts, do it precisely because it hurts, pain is your reward. Even if it only makes you want to kill yourself even more, do it to see how much you can truly make yourself hate being alive, let morbid curiosity be your muse and self loathing be your canvas. Let the years crush you down and flatten you until they leave nothing but a robot. Make your life be a partiture. Let muscle memory overtake your entire body and play out the rest of your life like a pianist who plays a song, so many times performed, that he barely even realizes what he’s doing. And then you’ll stay alive. And then you win. Congratulations, Yarimov, you’re a hero.

            He thought all this as he finished flipping the last of the switches and calibrated the last of the buttons. This entire speech was itself part of the routine, some times he added a little extra flair here or there if he felt inspired because, hey, he was only human and no matter how much he thought to himself about becoming a robot to survive he couldn’t help but try some flavor or touch of variance every now and then. He wondered if at some point the switches would erode away entirely by pushing them every day and this was the highlight of the week for him. A new thought! A new occurrence! An idea that he hadn’t thought of before! He though it again and shivers went down his spine. How fresh, how intriguing, how deliciously uncertain. He thought it a third time, relishing it, savoring it like candy. This didn’t last long since the same answer that came for any such idea came once more for this one: he would be long dead before that became a problem. Still, he had his fun and now there was a tiny droplet of happiness safely guarded in that point in his past and memory and he could come back to it and think “Hey! Remember that day when you wondered if the switches would erode by pressing them? How fun that was!” and that could last him for months. He hadn’t lost hope yet and that meant he hadn’t lost his sanity, and that meant he hadn’t lost his will to live. Today was going to be a good day.

* * *

 

            He ate his food, harvested from his own hydroponic garden, and drank his water, filtered through his body a million times already. The exact same molecules of H2O that he drank ten years ago were the ones he was drinking now. He did his exercises; he checked on the state of all the life support systems and repaired those that needed maintenance. He cleaned the entire place, did some more exercises, stretched, did a couple of puzzles to keep his mind sharp, he masturbated twice, took care of the garden and did exercises a third time and once he did all of that he still had five more hours until needing to sleep again. Ok, no point putting it off any longer, this was the part of his routine he hated the most but it was vital, if he stopped doing this the his first barrier, hope, would be lost and then he only would have sanity and then life left, and then he would loose. This was vital. He turned on the radio.

            “Mayday, mayday, is there anyone there?” he said, words loosing individuality, turning into one single word with its own unique accents and emphasis. “mah’da’mah’dasdaran’un’ereh?”

            “This is commander Gury Yarimov contacting base, is there anyone there?”

            Don’t say please, don’t say please, if you say ‘please’ then you’ll say ‘Im begging you’ and then ‘im desperate’ and the hope will be lost, so don’t say please.

            “Please somebody answer” it couldn’t be helped, he started saying it after his seventh year trapped in there and it became a part of his routine, every day he would promised he would stop saying it and every day he would say it all the same.

            “Please, please, somebody, anyone, answer me, please”

            And now the tears, also part of his routine, at this point he wasn’t even sad really, it was just that this was the moment of the day where his eyes were used to produce salt water by themselves.

            “Please…”

            And he would look out the window and he would see. He would see all that was lost, he would see the size of his folly every day, and this was a test. Because it was cute and all to talk about not loosing hope but what worth was to promise yourself that if you were not going to put your worth to the test? So he would see and he would remember. The giant pillar of light that shone so far away barely one year into his mission in space. He would remember loosing all communications with the surfaces as he watched the pieces of the earth’s crust fly along with the light, like crumbs loosing themselves in the eternal night. And he would remember the earth and see. He would see the earth, floating so far away from him. And he would orbit around it and, once more, he would see the crack. Yawning, open, fathomless darkness consuming the better part of an entire hemisphere. If he tried and measure the splinters that extended beyond the crack he would see how they became bigger every day.

            He was the last man on the universe because he couldn’t very well call himself the last on earth when he wasn’t even on earth. No, there was probably no men left on earth anyway, yet he had to try and call. He had to have hope because he was commander Gury Yarimov, the last kosmonavt. And he was a hero.

            He didn’t spend the whole five hours watching the grotesque spectacle that was his home planet. Once he considered his job done for the day he would go to the other side of the tin can that was his ship and look away from the earth, to the stars or the moon. And he would draw. He was a star charter aficionado. And the thing was that he didn’t rely exclusively on his eyes to do this, his ship had a small telescope with both infrared and ultraviolet receiver, as well as a radioscope. So he would chart the cosmos in multiple wavelengths with as much resolution and fidelity as he was able. He hadn’t been doing this for the entire ten years he had been there; this was something he started around year four. And most of his progress was slow. Even after all this time, he wasn’t all that good at it. The moon was proving to be the most difficult to chart. The starts were for the most part dots against a black canvas but the satellite had mountains and seas and craters and all of their concurrent shadows. Sometimes he would allow himself to fantasize of the lifeforms that could be out there, sometimes even indulging in the possibility that aliens would come visiting the earth only to find it desolate but for him, and they would pick him up and take him on adventures. And he would voyage across galaxies in his tiny little can. Then he would flip all the switches back off and go to sleep.

            The next day was like this and the next one too and then the day after that someone in the radio finally answered.

            “Hello” said a voice with a thickly nasal accent, distorted by heavy static “Is someone there?”

            Gury grabbed the mic without much emphasis, like he did a thousand times.

            “Please somebody answer…” that was not what he wanted to say.

            “Here we answer in the name of empire, report position and name”

            “P-please somebody, anyone” he was trying to force other words out of his mouth but he couldn’t “answer me p-please, pl-please”

            “We are answering, can you not hear us?”

            He could, he could and he couldn’t answer because answering would have meant to say words he hadn’t said in a decade, to say anything beyond what the routine had carved in him was unthinkable, and yet he tried.

            “Pl-ease, p-p-please, please, please, ple-easse, pleeeaese, p-p-p-p-…”

            And now the tears, like every day, except today they meant something again.

            “I am afraid he has lost sanity, we might no be able to use him” said the voice, a little weaker, like he was speaking away from the mic.

            “Plase! Please! Please! P-p-p-pleaaaaaaaaai…eaaaaiii…eaaaaiiiiiiiiiiii”

            “We can’t recuperate vessel without cooperation and he seems unable to do so” the voice was now arguing with someone on their side, arguing to let him go.

            “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiii…..aaaaiii….ai……i….am….Gury Y-Y-Yarimov….”

            “Wait, what is he saying?”

            “I am c-commander Gury Yarimov, Kosmonavt, pilot of the Sputnik-2 vessel; I hear you, I’m here, I’m alive”

            “Oh” the voice replied, matter of fact “Good, then I am the Foremost citizen of the empire”

* * *

 

            The man saw the vessel descend from the skies into the newly built landing platform with a wide smile and a jutting chin. His clothing was composed by a large leather coat and an oversized hat, belonging to this or that military general from an army that he and his brother defeated ten years ago. He was young, he was powerful and he had nothing to prove to anyone. He had been running a country since he was a kid. He was the Foremost citizen.

            The column of smoke and fire through which the ship was descending didn’t even fetter him. He had seen bigger destruction, occasionally caused by him. Once the ship landed he simply walked across the catwalk and banged on the metal hatch. What a marvel of engineering that was. This had been his pet project for the last five years. He had found the blueprints, the archives and the materials kept away in secret bunkers in enemy land, which he simply gained access to by looking at the reinforced metal doors for a few seconds. He then, realizing the potential of this information, hired, or rather persuaded, or rather extorted, dozens of unpaid workers to put together the structure that would host the ship once it landed. Then, finally, he scoured the wavelengths trying to communicate with the supposed ship that was still out there. Now, after five years, here he was, having just brought a man from the cosmos back to earth, all (from his point of view) by himself, just another proof of the greatness of him, his brother and their empire.

            It took a while for all the pistons and hydraulics to kick in gear swinging the door open. When this happened the door turned out to be a good ten inches thick and behind it was a man in an old fashioned spacesuit, filled with patches of duck tape and tattered joints here and there.

            “In name of Tzar I welcome thee to empire, commander Yarimov” he extended his hand. The kosmonavt didn’t answer in kind but said instead.

            “W-what are the, the, the radiation l-levels?” he seemed unaccustomed to vocalizing and the words fell with sloppiness out of his mouth.

            “Radiation levels have not increased since last time you been on planet” said the young man, retreating his hand slowly.

            “Th-that can’t be possible, I, I, I saw…I saw what…the…the bomb…”

            “There was no bomb in last war, only Tzar, and me”

            The man from space didn’t know how to proceed, one of the core pillars in his understanding of the world, that a giant bomb had destroyed the earth, had been taken from him. The government officer took it from there.

            “You are being informed that your country was annexed into empire since the war and thus you have been incorporated into its forces, you are now officially chief commander of aerial forces of empire”

            “Th-the empire?”

            “The glorious and most greatest empire on the face of planet earth, yours is great honor, you will explain government workers which will be assigned to you how to retro fit and incorporate experimental technology that was developed by enemies during time of war so that your vessel can serve more readily the needs of the empire”

            “C-can I meet my family f-first? i…there is a lot of things that I have been wanting to do all these years and…”

            “They are dead” the man didn’t sound sorry about it at all, no ‘I regret to inform you’, no ‘it is my grave duty to let you know’, simply the fact, treated as merely that, a fact and not the heart crushing revelation that it was. “Everyone from your country died, if not during war then surely after, a good seventy percent of its surface has been consumed by cracks or pestilence”

            “B-but…what…no”

            “Yes, you are part of empire now and you will perform duty, understood?”

           Many others in that situation would have just cracked, many did. Plenty would have crumbled to this new information, falling apart, their souls giving out and soon their bodies following. But he was Gury Yarimov and he had trained himself to withstand what lesser souls couldn’t. Yes, his hope indeed was shattered, but only that. Hope took the brunt of the hit and thus sanity and life remained intact. There was no longer a bright future ahead of him but he was still in control of his own capacities, he was still alive.

            “I understand”

            “Good”

            “But I do have conditions”

            The Foremost raised an eyebrow; he was unaccustomed to anyone imposing conditions on him.

            “I will help re-re-reconfigure the ship to whatever spe-ssspess-specifications you have, and I will do my service for the…the empire…but I assume I wont be working…working twenty four seven”

            “What does ‘twenty-four-seven’ means?”

            “Uh…it means all the time”

            “Certainly not”

            “Then…then I do have one request as to how to spend the rest of my leisure time”

            “What would that be?”

            He was going to say this, he was going to answer and risk that his second safeguard be also destroyed leaving only his raw will to live to keep him going, but once hope had been shattered away this was the only path left for him.

            “That I can go back to space”

* * *

 

            And here he was now, twenty five years later and by this point beyond used to it. It turned out that hope had been holding him back all along. Now that it was lost he could finally loose himself into becoming just one more part of his spaceship. Unquestioning and fitting into his position like the screws or the wires or the metal plates that made up the vessel. He was just one more engine keeping the thing functioning for that was his purpose and that was his whole existence. He no longer dreamed or charted the stars. An engine doesn’t do that. What an engine does is to keep the machinery working and occasionally answer the calls of the Foremost which, as the years passed, became more and more rare. It had been fun to have him at first but soon the officer had to admit that there wasn’t much use for a spaceship in today’s world. He was a satellite now, relaying communications across distant points of the empire.

            And here came a new message.

            “HEY! What is up brother mine brother!?” it was the bandit Karachay, or as he knew him ‘Transmic-09905f’

            “So yeah, I was just calling to let you know something, guess fucken what? You better be revving up those guns you promised because I have a little gift for ya! What is it? Oh just some tawdry little bitch who thinks she’s big shit just because she had a gun, which now I have, the first of many, many, many more I hope, eh brother dear brother? Any way, is the spyglass strumpet you were talking about or whatever her name was, mirth damn, you like ‘em feisty, ill tell you what! Anyway, gotta go, see you soon, brother mine brother!”

            He pushed the buttons, moved the switches and the message was retransmitted to earth, the Foremost was going to receive it soon enough.

            He moved about his metal can feeling every surface, caressing it like it was his own old and deteriorated body. He didn’t do much exercise these days, there wasn’t much of a point to it, microgravity was going to be the only kind of gravity he was going to experience, his trips to earth diminishing as they were.

            He looked at the earth for a split second and one more time he remembered why he was better up here. Then he looked the other way and saw the moon for much longer.

            That was all he needed.


	10. Chapter 10

            The chase entered its third hour; her hands were still tied up, her wrists hurt, her back hurt, everything hurt. Karachay was still following her and she still didn’t know where the fuck Harmonica was. Telescopica cursed under her breath.

            She had been lucky so far, managing to avoid Karachay’s shots at her, then getting one of the cars behind her to stop following since it ran out of fuel, and then with Karachay no longer using his powers after the first hour of chase. She ignored if this last turn of events was due to the man getting tired (was such a thing possible?) or because he had gotten angry enough to wish upon her a death far slower and more excruciating than the one a quick explosion would offer. Whatever it was she was thankful that she didn’t have to keep evading craters anymore.

            Her mind was very close to breaking, this persecution didn’t count as fulfilling her mission, none of this was bringing her any closer to Harmonica and so the memories were still gnawing at her mind, except that she couldn’t even properly process them, distracted as she was with surviving, so a pressure that couldn’t be acknowledged was building up inside her, giving her a headache. Or perhaps it was just the noise and rattle from the engine.

            This was stupid, running away was proving to be useless, she had to use her head. These guys were going to keep chasing until one of them ran out of fuel and she was not going to bet on her own tank. She couldn’t risk try to turn around and shoot at them, if she could take time to aim and kill so could Karachay and her shooting was compromised by the rattling of her vehicle.

            The thought of throwing something at them so it would work as an obstacle was a useless one, but it led her to an interesting idea. One of the only things she could throw was the box with bullets. The guy had insisted on how precious they were to him, if she threw them, would he risk loosing them? Or would he stop to pick them up? What if she threw them individually, scattering them across a vast distance? Would they try to pick every single one? It was worth a shot.

            Now the tricky part was to manage that without stopping her car. She took off her coat leaving her shirt on, stained by dirt, that had later turned into mud by the sweat and the blood that escaped from her bandages. Then, using only one hand, she contrived a few knots to tie the steering wheel to the rest of the car so it could stay in course. Then she jumped out of her seat. The car went on by momentum alone but the speed started to reduce almost instantly. In one stride she grabbed the box and started dragging it. It was heavy so the process was slow and the chasers were gaining on her. When she was half way she went back to her seat and pressed the pedal again. She stopped loosing ground but she didn’t recuperate what she had given up. Now they were a lot closer to her. The explosions resumed.

            She tried to stir away, forgetting that she had tied the wheel. The car barely changed trajectory and the tires bounced in the newly formed craters. There was no fixing that, she went back to dragging the box near the driver’s seat. Any of the explosions around her could get her at any moment or the resulting craters could crash her car but she went on.  Then she coupled all the strength in her upper body to put the box on the chair, whilst contorting to keep a foot on the gas. Then finally she tipped the box against the window and the bullets started to pour on the road. This was perhaps the hardest part since her training loathed the waste of good ammo. But surviving was more important. Still, she managed to catch whatever bullets she could and put them on her pockets for later.

            Once the box had lost three quarters of its contents she finally threw the whole thing out the window and then went back to try and untie the steering wheel. As she did this she risked one look from her shoulder. The pursuers where stopping. Moon bless. She kept going.

            The fuel lasted for one hour more, by that point she was sure she had lost the trail of the bandits. She came down from the car and saw a forest nearby. That was the way her feet led her. By this point she was still filled with adrenaline and her hands shook slightly. The memories and compulsive thoughts were not accosting her anymore, her mind was too strung up for it and her body was too tired. Once she reached the trees she climbed them and used her ruined coat to tie herself to a branch. Once this was done she fell unconscious, knowing that the nightmares were awaiting.

* * *

 

            There was a robot that was built to love.

            A heart was made for him, unlike that of a human heart in that it knew not of hatred or suffering, since his purpose was to spread happiness to the world. Perched he was atop a hill, surrounded by flowers and the shade of the willow trees. A shiny road made of turquoise pebbles lead to him. And to him where the kids from all across the land. To receive his warmth.

            He loved everyone yet he could not show this through hugs or kisses, nor through gifts or games. All that the robot could do was to tell stories, and through them, make his audience joyous. For his lone want was to see merriment in others and there his own joy could be reflected.

            His body was not metal, since metal rusts and the corruption of time was forbidden from being displayed wherein only escapism was meant to be experienced. He was made of a special material, rigid yet soft. No edges were part of his design; all his lines flowed into each other making him like the wind and water. His geometry was that of a lump, no legs, he needn’t go anywhere and no hands, he needn’t grab anything. All he had was a face with a permanent smile molded on it and two eternal, unblinking eyes, saluting everything and encompassing everyone so as not to loose the slightest smile, the tiniest twinkle of the eye or the widest and toothiest of grins. Which he would always flawlessly return in kind.

            The kids would go and ask for a tale and he, in his infinite cleverness would, on the spot, invent a story just for them, where he would tell not only what the listener wanted but what they needed to hear. A tale where someone, very much like the child who asked, would go on adventures that might resemble, if not at the very least on a metaphorical level, that of the kid who was listening. And in these stories the protagonist would always be good and kind and valid. His heroes would be deserving of love and love they would receive in plenty, in these scenarios he could boon his audience with what he could not give in the real world. He would make them rich, and beautiful and virtuous and wanted. He would give them happy endings always and never let for even a second anguish to be experienced in any way. And then he would see them laugh and smile and return to him all the love that he gave and this was never a loss. He would surrender the love within his heart that powered him, and when the kids returned it, it would be enriched by their own experiences and emotions and his happiness increased in an endless cycle.

            And the robot loved.

            Until one day came a girl. A pretty young girl, with long blonde hair, a hooked nose and sleepy eyes. The love machine knew her, how could he not? She was the girl who in all her stories, in all of his tales, amidst a cheering crowd, would stay quiet. She was the one whose enthusiasm was never as big as the rest. Never as cheerful, never as gleeful, never as shiny. That day she was alone, there was not another soul in the hilltop. She asked for a story and the robot took this as his chance to amaze her, he crafted the finest narrative for her, about a valiant princess (with blonde hair and a hooked nose and sleepy eyes) who would stand up against a monster. Many mighty knights and heroes tried to defeat the creature in the past but they all returned untriumphant. Until this girl alone went up the far away castle where the monster was. Undaunted by the tallest of bridges or the coldness of the weather or the length of the thorns that grew all across the palace. She would enter the unwelcoming halls and traverse the mazelike corridors until she came across the beast. The creature would rise, dark and menacing, as tall as it could be and stand in front of the girl. But she was not scared by any of this. Instead she just said three words, three very special words that the beast had never heard of before. And then the monster would collapse and transform itself into the most handsome and most beautiful prince, with a golden crown and silken uniform. He would invite her to his castle to live as the queen and they would live for a hundred and fifty years ruling the land with wisdom and kindness. The end.

            The girl listened to all of this quiet and once he finished he waited for the question, the obvious question that she would ask, “What were the words the girl said to the monster” and then the robot would proudly answer, both explaining but also declaring: “I Love You”.

            But instead the girl asked: “can I tell you a story?”

            The robot was caught by surprise by this. He was the one who told stories and the kids where the ones who listened. Yet he told his tales to give love expecting the kids to return it, so telling a story was perhaps her way to return her love. Perhaps this was why she always seemed such an unengaged listener. Perhaps he had finally found out how to connect with her. This filled him with excitement and said that yes, he’d love to hear her story. And she sang a song.

         _“Alla en la fuente habia un chorrito_

_se hacia grandote, y se hacia chiquito_

_y en la fuente las hormigitas_

_limpiaban sus enaguitas_

_porque querian irse al campo_

_todas vestidas de rojo y blanco_

_pero al chorrito no le gusto_

_que lo vinieran a molestar_

_se hizo chiquito y se_ _escondió_

_entre las flores de aquel lugar”_

            Once she was finished she looked at the robot, which stood there silently.

            ‘And then what happened?’ the robot asked.

            ‘The little stream was gone’ answered the girl.

            ‘Gone?’

            ‘Yes, gone, he made himself small and hid away; he couldn’t become the same little stream any more’

            ‘But why?’

            ‘Because he wanted to be alone and the little ants wouldn’t leave him alone, so he went away, to be alone’

            ‘And then?’ the robot insisted.

            ‘And then he was gone’ the girl insisted. And then she went away as well and then the robot was left alone.

            The machine could not understand this, try as he might to dedicate all of his cleverness to it. Why would such a story exist? What could it be its purpose? What did it meant? How could the poor little stream just disappear? Be gone? Forever? Why couldn’t the ants leave him be? Why did it felt so…so…what was even the word for it? It was more than just wrong. Someone who says ‘two plus two is five’ is wrong but this was different. That for such a selfish act as the one from the ants, that used the stream as nothing but an object who couldn’t just be left alone, the stream would feel so bad by this that he had to force himself to change and become something smaller just to feel peace once again, to the point that he would harm himself and then disappear, it wasn’t just wrong, it was…unfair.

            Unfair. The robot tried this new word. Unfair. Unfair. Unfair. He couldn’t get rid of it. For the fact was that the girl, instead of giving love to him, had given him this. The idea of unfairness and that in itself was most unfair of all. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he had lived his life just like he was supposed to and this was what he got, this was a part of the reality he had been forced to become a part of. He hadn’t been warned or made to know that this was a thing that happened and had he known, he could not have avoided it anyway. But his soft tender heat was still supposed to love in this world whilst receiving that wrongness of it. But there was no use. Nor it was a part of him and there was no getting rid of it.

            Soon his stories started to feel void and empty. How could he tell stories of unspoiled happiness in a world that was not like that at all? So his stories started to change. He started to introduce unfairness into them. A hero who didn’t got exactly what he wanted, a princess who saved her castle but soon she would loose it again, a kid who fought long a hard for a reward that never came, and then he would keep fighting and then he would fight for the rest of his life and then he would die, alone and hated, never getting his reward.

            And as the robot continued telling these stories, the darkness that was hosted inside his heart started to grow and grow until it seeped through his body, growing out of the corners of his eyes and mouth, spreading like moss or sickly veins. And the kids would stop laughing and cheering and they would start crying. They would tell him that they didn’t like his stories. And this was not love. But he could not understand why. He was telling them the truth. A truth that he could only now see, which was that once you understand that there is horror in the world you also understand that there is no law, no principle, no hard rule that stops the horror from being too much.

            The kids would not comprehend and then he would insist, he would make his stories stronger so it would get to their hearts and they could also understand. He would tell stories of children with wicked parents who grabbed their kids and tortured them and mutilated them and humiliated them in display, and everyone would laugh at the deformed torsos that used to be the children. He would tell these stories so the kids would know that this was a thing that could happen and there was no hand of god that would come from the heavens and stop it. And by this point the robot was not smiling anymore, a frown would have taken his face long ago and his scowl would pierce anyone who dared look at him.

            The kids never returned to him. He was left alone.

            And then, old men came to him. Claiming that there was something wrong with him, that he was broken and that he had to be taken away.

            ‘Why’ would ask the robot. But the men wouldn’t answer.

            ‘Why?’ he’d ask again, but nothing would be said as they unscrewed him form his platform.

            ‘WHY!?’ he would scream, finally in desperation ‘why would you do this to me? Why did you created me in this world? Only to destroy me? To do to me the same thing that the ants did to the little stream!? Why? Why? Why?’

            And as the men tried to grab him he would push, he would push and strain his dark and twisted heart and the veins that grew across his body would swollen and the lines of his shape would twist. And he would start to rock in his place, back and forth, back and forth. Until finally he lost his equilibrium and fell on his side. Hitting his face.

            ‘Pain, pain, pain’ he would keep twisting and shaking, the men were unsure of how to proceed ‘pain, pain, pain’ and out of his suffering, arms would start to grow at his sides, deforming him excruciatingly. He was not supposed to be this yet he couldn’t stop from changing. ‘Pain, pain, pain’ he started to grow legs which were wrongness as well but he did it all the same. And he stood, with his new, misshapen body. The men were looking at him in awe.

            Then that wretched creature ran away. And just when she was about to find out what the robot did to the people of the world Telescopica woke up.

            She shook her head, stretching her sore body. Sleeping on a tree was never a good idea but it was the safest option available. She walked up to a near river and washed her face to get rid of the phantasmagorias of the night. What a dumb nightmare, that had not been the way things happened. Her subconscious was taking some mayor poetic liberties to process her past. This was what happened when she strayed from her mission. Well, no more of that. Now that she was rid of the bandit she was back to business.

            Harmonica was on the empire now, and so was Telescopica. Things were going to get harder, moving on enemy land. She had heard stories of the things that happened in this country. Apparently the bandit was not the worst thing that went bump in the night. Besides the monster at the throne himself, there was another man, some officer with a stick up his ass and a pair of dark shades, going from one place to the other enforcing draconian laws, and his name was Jerry the Noble or something.

            Well, Telescopica had bullets again. She wasn’t particularly worried.

* * *

 

            “Aw, seems like you lost her boss!”

            The bandits were at an old oil station, mostly fallen apart, except for the pumps that still worked and held some refined petroleum in them. A new vehicle had just arrived with all its noise and dust-cloud around it, driven by Karachay himself.

            “I didn’t lost shit, Baulder, my dear, I just let her go after assessing my priorities” said the leader and he stepped out of his car with his other lackey, Fucko.

            “And what would those be?”

        “Getting your bullets back, my boys!” he said, dragging the giant metal box behind him “And thankful you should be, because collecting all of them was a mighty burdensome task, I tells ya”

            “Aw boss, thanks”

            “Skip you fucking thanks and pull down you pants this instant, that I’m tired and frustrated and need some fucking release, for mirthsake!”

            The minions looked at each other until one of the shrugged and did as requested.

            “But what about the bitch boss?” said the guy, getting in all fours.

            “Oh, I haven’t forgotten about her, na-nay, but see, who fucking has the time to go around chasing broads? Not this guy for sure, nghh…aw yeah, there we go”

            They started fucking right there, while everyone else watched unperturbed.

            “Sure, if I ever get my hands on her again, well, I’m sorry brother dear brother, but I ain’t giving her to you, no siree, I unff…I will have my fun with her..unghh…”

            “And ugh…what…what do you mean by fun, boss?”

            “Oh, don’t be jealous my pets, uh, you’re tight today, Baulder,  the only part of me that is going to get in her is this baby” he said raising his two fingers, only to then slap the guy in front of him in the ass.

            “Oooh!”

            “Yeah, you fuken like that doncha? As I was saying, unf… ill put these inside of uh… her, maybe her mouth, maybe the other side, haven’t unghh… decided yet, and then, splat! I’ll get to see…unff…I’ll get to see…OH MIRTH….unf….unf…unf….” he climaxed and then took a time to catch his breath back “I’ll get to see her loins explode from the inside out”

            “Unf…unf…sounds….sound good boss…uh, would you mind to keep going on…? I uh…I haven’t…”

            “Someone else take care of Baulder! Imma go take a nap”

            “Sure boss” said Fucko, pulling his pants as well.

            As he walked back into the car, not bothering to pull up his slacks back, he heard something. A clanking noise coming from inside the ruined building. Everyone, including the two guys who were going at it, turned their heads towards the noise, which had being caused by a young girl with an oversized coat, carrying two giant buckets filled with oil, trying to walk away from the group. Realizing she had been discovered she left the buckets in the ground and stood straight.

            “Hi guys!” she said, cheerfully. “Having fun I see”

            Karachay realized perfectly well who she was, it was in her hair, her face, her accent. All similar to that of the woman which had slipped out him a few hours ago. This could be none other than Harmonica, the dangerous, chaotic, psychopathic criminal that spread destruction everywhere she went. He was just not in the mood to deal with that right now.

            “Fuck off” he said raising his fingers and shooting his will at her head.

            Nothing happened.

            “Hey! Don you know is rude to point at people with your finger, you fucking faggot?” she said.

            He stood there speechless. His aiming couldn’t be that bad. He pointed again, more carefully and said.

            “Bang”

            Nothing.

            “And you keep doing it! I mean, I knew you were a criminal but I didn’t know you were so impolite!”

            He walked up to her, hand still extended, bang, bang, bang. Until he was touching the tip of her nose and she remained there, undisturbed.

            “Yes that’s my nose, what of it? Is this you trying to seduce me or something? Because man, no wonder you are a sodomite, you must be terrible with the ladies”

            He pointed at the ground near them, it exploded with rocks flying everywhere, he pointed at her again and no reaction. She looked at the explosion.

            “Wait just a darn rooting tooting minute…is that what you are trying to do to me?” she looked at him in the eyes with a grin spreading across her face “and you can’t! You can’t! You can’t! You can’t!” she started dancing and jumping all around him, poking him with teasing fingers “you cant you fucking looser! Oh my moon, you suck! You suck and I’m so much more better and cooler than you’ll ever be! Ahahahahahahahahahaha!”

            The other bandits were starting to walk towards them with ill intent on their faces.

            “I bet you fucking hate it! I bet it makes your blood boil! Ahahahahaha!”

            He put two hands on her shoulders stopping her prancing about.

            “Actually” he said “I find it mighty fascinating, my skraeling”

            “Oh, you do?”

            “I do…now tell me” he said as he started to sport a smile almost as manic as hers “How do you feel about your sister?” 


	11. Chapter 11

            The Foremost was leaving the palace when he was intercepted by the new employee, Maurice. The government uniform didn’t suit the big guy one bit, his frame was too large in the wrong places, making the fabric stretch awkwardly and the seams to tense, cutting a large portion of his movements. On top of that he insisted on wearing the regulatory hat backwards, making him look like a child. Yet the Foremost was not going to be the person to chastitise the man for that. The uniforms had been something largely pushed by him when he was young and freshly in control of the empire. Since then he had grown to regret the decision, considering the clothing burdensome and impractical. But after the years passed, these regulations took a life of their own and he had to obey them as much as anyone else who was working for the emperor. But if Maurice wanted to go against regulation, he was free to do so in the presence of the Foremost citizen.

            “Hello Jerry, there is a message for you from Chachachay”

            “Is Karachay, and I am Foremost, yes?” the new position hadn’t tempered Maurice’s humor one bit, which the officer welcomed as a breath of fresh air. “What does he say?”

            “Uh, let me see, I have the transcript here, um, ok, yes, ‘dearest brother’ and I quote: ‘HEY! What is up brother mine brother! So yeah, I was just calling to let you know something, guess fucken what? You better be revving up those guns you promised because I have a little gift for ya! What is it? Oh just some tawdry little bitch who thinks she’s big shit just because she had a gun, which now I have, the first of many, many, many more I hope, eh brother dear brother? Any way, is the spyglass strumpet you were talking about or whatever her name was, mirth damn, you like ‘em feisty, ill tell you what! Anyway, gotta go, see you soon, brother mine brother!’ end quote, you know?’ said Maurice, chuckling “Your brother has a way with words, that’s for sure”

            “So he managed to catch Telescopica, impressive”

            “Who’s Telescopica?”

            “An assassin from your kingdom”

            “Never heard of her”

            “She chases her sister Harmonica”

            “Oh, yes, that one I know, she burned down my town…fuck that bitch”

            “I hope to establish contact with Telescopica soon”

            “To help her stop the psycho?”

            “Yes, for that mostly, now Maurice” Said the Foremost, concentrating his eyes on his employee “I need you to stay here in palace and wait for return of mine brother with Telescopica, once she is here you’ll escort her to one of our waiting rooms and make sure she is made comfortable until I return, yes?”

            “Sure thing, Jerry”

            “Thank you, Maurice”

            The Foremost went on his business and left the building.

* * *

 

            The Foremost entered the once clandestine bar and took in the scene in front of him.

            He saw the Inquisitors, looking as proud of themselves as a kitten licking the remains of some unlucky rodent off its paws. Next to which where the rebels, beaten, bloody and tied. They had been found after days of work where many doors were kicked and bodies were tortured in the seeking for information. Until they managed to triangulate one of the main clusters of the opposition and bring down the suitable punishment.

            The place had been a small alcohol distillery, hidden behind a vegetable market. They used some of the old, rotten vegetables to ferment and distill alcohol from. A bit of this brew was whisked away for private consumption but most of it was actually used to make Molotov cocktails, some of which had found their way towards important political figures and politicians. The plan was to disarm the emperor, if all the political figures that made the organization of the empire where eliminated the emperor would be left alone with no more fingers to pry on the people. What a nice, idealistic plan. The Foremost could not let this stand and so he cracked down on them.

            Now, after all inquisitions had been performed and all the pawns and knights were rounded up, the only thing left to do was finding the king. The leader of the organization.

            “Status report” said the Foremost to the agents scattered across the place, some of which were putting their metal instruments away, still lightly soaked in blood.

            “Salutations, Foremost citizen, the precinct has been rectified” said the woman with the biggest hat and the widest red cape, signaling her as the coordinator of the inquisitions within the capital.

            “Salutations, agent, at ease” it felt good to follow the proper protocol, for once, and be addressed in the manner the Foremost citizen was supposed to be addressed. He hadn’t had much of that lately. “What is status of criminals, agent Jarrah?”

            “The malcontents were rounded up and put through the channels of coercive communication, we managed to asses the level of information possessed by them and determined that the sensible data was held only by him” she pointed at a particularly damaged individual who was lacking one eye “we emphasized our efforts on his persona yet his resistance has superseded us”

            “I see, your work here is done, is my turn now to handle situation” he put one hand on the shoulder of the agent “you did good work today”

            The line came out rather awkwardly and only got a confused look from the woman who was not used to this kind of behavior from the Foremost in the least. She then called her agents who put their still blood soaked instruments away and marched outside the building. There was no problem in leaving the Foremost alone with a group of rebels, even if they had not been tied up and defeated and tortured, he would still be perfectly able to defend himself from them.

            Once he was alone the officer walked up to the tattered man and kneeled in front of him.

            “What you did was disgrace, to your intellect and to your fellow citizens…but you do not even realize the magnitude of it”

            The man said nothing, perhaps he was ignoring him or perhaps he was too weak to talk. The Foremost went on.

            “I am not talking about treason to empire, I am talking about treason to world it self, what do you think Tzar would have done had you succeeded? You think he would stay alone in palace, not daring to go out? You think that had he go out you would be able to take him down together? That he is only one man and not the monster that put a crack in middle of world?”

            At this the prisoner actually raised his head, as did the others in the room, surprised that such an important political figure would quote the famous seditious poem.

            “He is monster, this even I admit, his power is abominable beyond conception, he shattered half the world once and you prodded him not thinking that he might shatter the other half, that the monstrous emperor’s mirth would not expire and there would be no doom and fire to consume us all, why do you think that poem exists if not to remind you all of this truth?”

            Now the man was looking at him directly, or rather examining his own reflection in the shade’s glasses.

            “Now you are going to tell me who your leader is, because if he is not stopped he will push Tzar too far soon or later and then there will be no more world to save for you or anyone, yes?”

            “What difference does it make?” answered the man with a lisping voice, his tounge was presumably badly cut “if the world ends or the Tzar is defeated, one way or the other our suffering comes to an end”

            The officer had to take pause hearing this, he did this because had he not forced himself to stillness and to reassess his actions he would have destroyed the man right then and there. Luckily the violence of his reaction was so uncharacteristic that it surprised him and he managed to rein in. This was the second time he encountered this kind of attitude, the second time he experienced that feeling of trying to reason something so incredibly basic and important with someone and hitting a wall of sheer egocentrism. The first had been with that politician he had killed in the throne room and the second was now, though this form of selfishness came from a very different source. It was the self-centeredness of someone whose problems were so big that they eclipsed everything else; he was truly willing to destroy the world and everyone in it because, to him, not getting what he needed was just as bad. Everything else in his path be damned. This caused a feeling of impotence in the Foremost that he was not used to deal with and so his first response was to lash out. But, he reasoned, nothing was going to be accomplished like this. He had to chance tactics, this man was a nihilist, but what of the rest? Those who had raised their head when he quoted the dark oracle and who were still clinging to his words.

            “And does he speak for all of you? Is the world ending all the same to you, yes?”

            Everyone looked down.

            “Don’t bother” said the rebel “even if they wanted to betray us they couldn’t, they don’t know who the leader is”

            The Foremost ignored him.

            “You are aware that world is ending, Tzar or no Tzar, the ichor is taking over rivers and rivers are taking over land and soon it will all crumble away” the rebels were listening to him once again, more rapt this time “you killing us is not going to change it, all you will do is destroy the only institution with any semblance of infrastructure that can do something about it all, and you dying for the cause will leave us with less workers to repair world with”

            The rebels looked at each other. This was the first time many of them heard quite how in shambles the planet was. As far as they knew the world was only composed by the capital and the empire that fed them lies. The fact that only now they were realizing truly how dire the situation was, and that this was told by a member of the government no less, was shaking everything they believed in.

            “You will be spared” he insisted “the only one who has to die is leader, you will be alive to help us repair the crack, let’s work together to stop the world from ending and then we can go back to fighting each other”

            “Doesn’t change anything” said the rebel he had been interrogating, but the agent could see how everyone else was looking at him with doubt in their eyes.

            “Mikahil, maybe you should just tell him…” said a woman tied up in a corner, covered in bruises.

            “Anna, no! We are not playing into his hands!”

            “Mike, for mirth’s sake, listen to the man, he is confirming a lot of what we feared, a lot of this coup rested on us trusting that we would be able to take care of things once the empire was gone but…” said another man with black skin, half if which was covered in red blood.

            “Shut up Ronnie! Shut the fuck up, we cannot bow to this monster, you really think he will spare us? Are you that fucking naïve? He will kill us all as soon as we tell him everything he wants to know”

            “Damnation mike” insisted Anna “None of us knew what we’d do once we got to the emperor, we just trusted that the leader would know how to take care of him but now we are finding out that if we had succeeded the world would have ended, you fucking immolate yourself if you want but we are supposed to make the world a better place!”

            The Foremost did his best to hide his smile; to gloat would have been a mistake here. There was a widespread idea that he was only in charge because he was the Tzar’s brother and because of his power, that he would only get things by threats of annihilation, and yet here he was, toppling down a revolution with nothing but the right words. Now it was time to follow it with the right actions.

            “If it is betrayal that you fear” he said as he made his way to the man called Ronnie “Then fear not, here, a gesture of good will” he untied the prisoner and helped him get up.

            “What are you doing?” asked the man, scared shitless.

            “I’m letting you go, be free, walk away, it costs me nothing to do so and everyone else can see that I’ willing to do it”

            The man stood there, confused.

            “I said go” insisted the Foremost “Do it, leave this place now, you are free!”

            Ronnie took a few steps towards the door and the he looked at his colleagues, who merely nodded with their heads encouraging him. The man left.

            “I can do the same with rest of you, but I need leader’s name” the Foremost said, then he just sat down on one of the only chairs that weren’t broken.

            Everyone else went back to persuading their leader.

            “We can all get out alive from this! There would still be hope!

            “Even without the leader we can regroup!”

            “You know he’d want us to go on without him!”

            Mikahil’s confidence was starting to crumble. His eyes were bouncing between his comrades and the Foremost, who was just looking at him, not saying anything.

            “Ok, i…” the rebel said “…I want to make a deal…you let them go first and then, only then, I’ll tell you who the leader is”

            “Very well” said the Government officer “You can all leave as well, I will not stop you, those who can walk help those who can not, go back to normal lives, but wait for call of empire, we will need strong courageous people to repair world, yes?”

            The prisoners stood up and slowly made their way out, some would throw occasional looks to the two people left on the room before crossing the door. Anna, the last one to exit, stopped and said.

            “Thank you Mikahil, we will not waste this opportunity”

            And then they were alone in the bloody, broken room.

            “Well then?” asked the Foremost. Mikahil took a deep breath.

            “It’s me, I am the leader, I never told them because they needed to believe in something greater than just a man, if they never saw the actual leader then he could be as great as they needed him to be, in their hearts, but it was me all along”

            “That is quite remarkable” said the Foremost.

            “Yes, so…how is it going to be? Are you going to do it right here or…?”

            “Execute you? Oh no, not now, we still have some things to talk about you and me, but let us go talk about them at the palace, yes?”

            “Whatever, I told you everything already”

            “We will see, come, stand up”

            The agent helped the man get to his feet; his steps were uncertain and weak. The Foremost had to basically carry the man by his shoulders to help him get outside.

            Once they got to the street they came across a full squad of rectifiers, holding the recently released prisoners by knife blade. The man with the widest shoulder pads, the commander of the rectifiers, stood right in front of the exit door, arms crossed at his back and a sardonic smile on his face.

            “Did these people got away from you somehow, Foremost?” asked the man, mockingly “or did you just let them go? Because I’m having a hard time deciding which is worse”

            “I send them to you, is what happened” answered the Foremost, unimpressed “I saw no reason to inform them of your squad waiting here for them, as protocol indicates”

            “Ah! Well, good to know then!” the smile stopped being sardonic and became a lot more earnest instead. The rectifier extended his arms to the sides as if he wanted to embrace the Foremost but understood that it would have been out of place.

            “You…! LIAR, TRAITOR!” screamed the rebel that was in the Foremost’s arms.

            “You call me liar, yet you are no better, you are not anyone’s leader, you are just a want-to-be martyr, desperate to die but too cowardly to do it yourself so you will look for someone else to do dirty job and make you look like hero, now listen to new deal”

            The Foremost grabbed the rebel by the sides and forced him to turn, making him look at his face.

            “You will not die, in fact I will make sure to give you most comfortable cell I can, I will give you my own room if I have to, but your collaborators will be executed one by one by rectifiers unless you answer me, and answer me the truth, yes? So all you have to do is stay quiet and you’ll get to sacrifice members of the rebellion in exchange for a long comfortable life”

            The leader of the rectifiers raised his eyebrows an then turned to look at his officers, nodding at them to indicate that they should follow what the Foremost had just said.

            “Who is real leader of rebellion?”

            “I…I’ll find the way to kill myself…you…”

            Ronnie’s throat was cut; the man drowned making gargles of blood.

            “NO!”

            “Look what posturing and pride has done, who is real leader of rebellion?”

            “H-his name is Rufus Wa…”

            “There is no such man”

            Another rebel’s neck was cut, this one tried desperately to hold the blood back, clawing at the two sides of the gash trying to keep them together but only achieving a wider and messier splatter of blood, some of which hit the rebel that was being interrogated.

            “IS THE TRUTH! IS THE TRUTH! RUFUS WALTERIAN!!!”

            “I am Foremost citizen of empire, it is my job and duty to cense the capital every year, there is no man called that”

            One more person was murdered, this one fell to the ground and started to crawl towards Mikahil, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He got far enough to grab the feet of the man but no farther before dying. The next in the line was Anna, she was crying.

            “I’LL TAKE YOU TO HIM!!! LET THEM GO AND I’LL TAKE YOU DIRECTLY TO THE LEADER!!!”

            Anna was killed.

            “Four people are dead so you can live life of luxury, thank you for surrendering your comrades, I want you to know that you will be rich, you will go down in the history books as a hero of empire”

            “HECTOR WATITI!!!! THE LEADER IS HECTOR WATITI!!! PLEASE STOP IS HECTOR WATITI!!! PLEASE!!!” the rebel was clawing at the Foremost uniform, yelling and throwing spit at his face. Yet the Foremost didn’t react to any of this. Instead he just raised a hand, indicating to the rectifiers that no more murder was needed.

            “What name you just said?”

            “HECTOR WATITI!!! Is…Hector…Hector is our leader, he is a black man, he lives in one of the poorer neighborhoods….please…please don’t let me live after this, please”

            “I know who he is” Answered the Foremost, his voice was monotone, his sight far away. He was no longer here but thinking of another place, a small dining room with metal walls where a hundred friendly conversations took place. “And I will honor our agreement”

            His two fingers went to the side of his glasses and Mikahil stopped existing.

 


	12. Chapter 12

            “No!”

            Yes.

            “Stop!”

            No. Telescopica raised her fourth hand.

            Harmonica’s heel exploded in a thousand pieces, making the little girl fall to the ground. She started dragging herself with her arms, towards a big oaken tree. The older sister kept walking. How it could have been this hard all this time? How could it ever taken her so long? When here she was, finally at her mission’s end, she had finally captured Harmonica.

            The girl reached the bark of the tree and then turned around to see her sister jumping over her and pining her to the ground. She struggled to get free but Telescopica was bigger and stronger and was holding her down with the full weight of her body.

            “I got you! I finally got you!” she sounded unhinged, it was rather scary.

            “Ok! Fine! You win! I give up, I give up!” the girl said “Can we please stop now? I’m tired!”

            “This is not stopping, I captured you, now I have to take you back to the kingdom, you piece of shit!”

            “What? No! I said stop it! the game’s over! This is no longer fun, you’re scaring me”

            Telescopica made a confused expression.

            “Fun? This was never fun! You think this is fun? You have any fucking idea of the things that you did!?” she was almost spitting over her sister.

            “Oh my god! I just broke your favorite doll! Is not that big a deal, mom can buy you a new one, let me go you freak!”

            “W-what? Doll? What are you…?” in her confusion she eased her grip on the girl and she took advantage of this to slip away. Harmonica stood up. She was no longer pretending to be hurt.

            “Stop it ok?” said the little girl “you’re acting all weird again, we have to go home, mom must be really worried, tomorrow we have school and I haven’t done my homework yet!”

            “No, no! This is…you are Harmonica! You are the dangerous murderer and…”

            “Oh Jesus, its happening again, is it not? Ginny! Tamara is having another episode!”

            Tamara turned her head to see who her sister was yelling to and saw a teenager, on the older side of her teens, with blonde hair and tired, droopy eyes, sting on a fallen tree, looking at them with absolute indifference. She was holding a red book.

            “Did you bring her pills?” asked the little girl.

            The teenager shrugged and went back to her book.

            “God dammit Gina! W-wait here Tammy, it’s ok, I’ll…I’ll go look for mom and she will help you ok?” The girl started to walk away but Tamara didn’t let her, grabbing her by the arm.

            “No, no I…I can’t let you go, you’re my mission, I have to capture you…”

            “Tammy, please, you’re hurting me, I’m your sister, Hannah, please!”

            “No! You are Harmonica!” she started to drag the girl away from the tree, where to? She had no idea. She looked around, the place looked like a suburb, how did she get here? Where there any suburbs in the empire?

            “Ginny, fricking do something, please!” The girl now sounded really panicked, her voice was shrilling uncontrollably. “Tamara is going crazy again, don’t just stand there!”   Gina sat in the fallen trunk, not moving her tired eyes from the red book.

            Tamara looked up at the sky; she needed to know where the sun was so she could guide herself back towards her kingdom. Something hit her in the ear, knocking away all sense of orientation.

            “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, but you were hurting me!” said the little sister “I’m going to look for mom and dad, they’ll know what to do”

            “No…wait, stop damnation!” she was loosing her balance and about to fall down to the ground, panic was creeping in; Hannah was going to escape once again. “Stop her!” she yelled at the girl reading the red book.

            Tamara tried to raise her gun so she could persuade the girl, but how could she when she could barely raise her own body from the ground. She fell and half of her face scraped against the rock below. The world was turned sideways and all she could see was the grass and her right hand that lay close to her nose. It was holding a branch, except this branch had been carved to be gripped as a pistol.

            There was an ironclad tension gripping her tendons by fits, she was convulsing. Hannah was gone and the girl with the tired eyes put her book away and stood up. She walked up to Tamara, putting one foot in front of the other, until one of her feet rested against her face.

            “You deserve this” she said. The sole of her shoe started to push her skull against the rocks. With this pressure on both her ears Tamara could hear her blood cascading across her head, she was blacking out. Gina kept pushing. Harder. And harder.

            And harder.

            “Gina stop!” said an adult voice nearby.

* * *

            Telescopica opened her eyes.

            She looked around and saw that she was still lost on the forest. She had been sleeping near an oaken tree, her head resting atop a pile of rocks. It had been a restless nap with dreams she could no longer remember.

            The previous day she had stumbled her way across the trees after having a piss poor night of sleep and a thoroughly exhausting day before that. After a moment of walking, her eyes slowly closing and opening, she realized she was still under the trees’ shade and that she could no longer see a place without them. In her disorientation she had wandered deeper into the woods. A couple of animals fell to her newly acquired bullets to be consumed afterwards by her eager mouth. Some of those eaten animals went back out her mouth later because, regardless of her capacities to get through fights and other perilous situations, she had almost no talent for actual plain old surviving and her cooking skills were lacking.

            Now, after a second night of comparatively better rest, but by no means humanly sufficient, she was a bit sharper and more focused, enough to be able to tell how lost she currently was. The trees were all around and the sunlight barely made it through the foliage with either muted brownish-green tones or piercingly white flashes. The shrubs were ancient and most of them dead long ago, more similar to sculpted columns than living things. Whatever few critters crawled through the floor, they were small, more tendon and nerves than actual muscle (another reason for why most of her dinner didn’t stay inside her for long), they more than likely fed on the oversized bugs that still thrived in today’s world. There was life here, but it was a scavenging, thin and sickly one. Moving across dead pillars of almost fossilized wood. And rivers. There were plenty of rivers here, few actually drinkable. Telescopica was able to tell the difference, usually, but in the half shadows of this place, distinguishing the thin oily layer of ichor floating on the streams got hard and more than once she had to keep the water a few seconds on her mouth before swallowing to make sure that there was no poisonous flavor lurking in the liquid. She only had to spit twice. This was the way in which she was making her way across the wilderness, trying to find anything that could help her orient her when a tree in front of her exploded  and several seconds afterwards a sound akin to an atom bomb went off behind her in what she estimated to be a good couple miles away.

            Her first thought was that Karachay had found her again but then a familiar smell calmed her anxiety. The smell was the cozy, well acquainted odor of gunpowder and molten metal. This was the product of ammo and a gun, things that were her bread and butter. She whipped her fourth hand and turned around; ready to face whatever new challenge life was throwing at her this time.

            All she saw was forest, as she had correctly guessed; the shooter was at the very least a mile away. She turned around again and saw the destruction the bullet had left in front of her. By the trail of destruction she could see that whoever shot was doing so more or less at the same height she was so the best course of action was to climb a tree to get lost amidst the branches so aiming at her became more difficult. The shooter had to be using some gargantuan machinery to be able to reach her from so far away, and such a contraption had to be heavy and hard to move around, the necessary adjustment of barely a fraction of a degree to aim a few meters higher from miles away was too delicate for something that big. Sure, they (for it had to be multiple people operating the weapon) could just demolish the tree where she hid from its roots but she could just jump to another one before that happened. And then keep jumping all across the forest with her attackers unable to aim directly at her.

            She was halfway climbing the nearest trunk when another explosion went off far away but this time there was no bullet juggernauting its way near her. Instead what happened was that the ground reverberated as if new rivers were about to form. She finished climbing the tree and peeked, atop its highest branches, the side above of the forest. Open skies on top her and a horizon of dead leaves all around. But far in the distance she saw a line of smoke, raising from the ground and elevating on the sky, and at the end of it she focused her trained eyes which could pierce distances as if they were not there and saw something astonishing. A witch riding a broom, except the broom was made of metal and the witch was a man.

            The meteoric man traced a parabolic trajectory across the clouds and once he reached the zenith of the arc he stood there a couple of seconds. He took advantage of those instants before gravity started dragging him down to grab the metal shaft he had been perched on and in one fluid motion he turned it around to make it point downwards. In the grip of the device and its general shape, revealed in its full glory thanks to the turn around, she could see that this was the weapon she had been shot with. Her experience made her classify that within the general realm of an anti-tank rifle, though the design was unlike that of any anti-tank rifle she had ever seen. One example of such eccentricity was the cannon, which was abnormally large and was currently pointed at the ground towards which the man was falling. He was going to die, clearly. Hopefully the weapon wouldn’t be too damaged to scavenge afterwards; because on the instant she saw it she craved it.

            Before he hit the top of the trees the gun went off again. He was about to land a few meters away from her and at this distance the explosion was almost deafening. All the trees, hard as rocks as they were, bended outwards in a concentric circle around the man, yielding to the blast wave. And the result of this was that all of the man’s velocity from the fall was neutralized and he managed to land on the ground with a lot less force that he would have otherwise. Telescopica had almost fallen from her branches after the explosion, if not for the blast then because of the whiplash that the trunk caused on her after bouncing back. She descended into the roots of the tree and saw in the middle of a recently formed clear in the middle of the woods, the lunatic that had arrived in such preposterous a method.

            He was as lanky and hard edged as the gun he carried, his chest bared, his only item of clothing were a pair of black pants and the body hair that covered most of him. By all means he shouldn’t have been able to carry that piece of artillery, it was completely out of proportion for a body as skinny as his and the length of the canon had to put the center of gravity of the gun entirely out of balance. And yet there he was, holding it with both his arms and looking completely relaxed for all of it. He was, in fact, smiling. But his smile was unlike those Telescopica had seen around lately, there were no manic emotions crawling on the corners of the mouth or the edges of the teeth. It was just an earnest, happy smile which only purpose was to greet her.

            “Sorry for that first shot!” he said, frank and friendly “it was mostly instinctual, I don’t like to see strangers in my forest and wanted to scare you away but then I stopped and realized you were alone and more than likely lost, so I came to aid you! My name is Kommando, you can call me Komm, who are you?”

            She didn’t let surprise or confusion make her relent, she had a mission.

            “I am Telescopica and I’m looking for Harmonica, have you seen her?”

            “Who’s Harmonica?”

            She relented.

            “She’s…she’s the infamous killer, she leaves destruction and misery wherever she goes, and she is now in your empire”

            “Oh, the empire’s still around? I would have thunk that it collapsed by now”

            “You are a very isolated man” and thus completely useless to her “tell me how to leave this forest”

            “Just keep on walking” he said, shrugging “the forest is not infinite; eventually you’ll get out of it”

            “What’s the fastest direction to do that?”

            “I dunno, I don’t concern myself with how to get out”

            She turned her back and kept on walking.

            “Question: why are you looking for this so called infamous killer?”

            “Because she’s my mission” she said as she tried not to trip on the roots and the uneven terrain below her.

            “Well, pardon my honesty but you don’t look in any condition to chase a dangerous killer, if you don’t mind, would you like to come to my base for food and rest?”

            “No, can’t stop, can’t loose time”

            “Yes, ok, and when the time comes and you finally face this criminal you wont be able to even raise your fists or stand up by yourself, and she’ll probably slip away”

            Telescopica stopped. It could be said that she was stubborn, but she was not stupid.

            “And let me be so bold as to guess, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

            She turned around. He was looking at her, still with a smile on his face.

            Her body was a tool, just a tool. And yet when she thought of her fourth hand, a tool as well, she realized she took far more care of it than she did with the rest of herself. She looked at her body, the shirt, crusty with dirt and blood, the yellow-brown bandages on her shoulder, the cuts and scabs and bruises. She did more than just look, she felt; she felt the sickening weakness that was creeping along her muscles, which had been kept at bay by nothing but sheer force of will. She felt the dizzying headache that had been building behind her eyes for the past week, she felt the brutal drum of her heart and she found it alarmingly irregular. Had she been foolish?  Perhaps, she had certainly been irresponsible. To abuse of such an important instrument as her body not realizing that it could break and then the mission would be left incomplete. That was an enemy she didn’t even stop to consider.  She thought back to all those moments where everything could have so easily ended for her, where she could have died, and this thought was a conscious decision, a need to reassess her actions. But it also opened the door to a lot of things she had pushed away. Things that she could not entertain and now, without warning, simply because she had deigned to acknowledge them for even a second, they pounced on her like rabid animals.

            The sudden realization of her own mortality. In that moment she knew its grip. But she was a consummate fighter and this was no different from many other fights she had in the past, and so her expression betrayed no emotion.

            “I could use some nourishment” she admitted, holding herself.

            “Very well, come here” he said raising his weapon and twisting it around.

            “I am not riding that thing” she answered, thinking of how that man had arrived.

            “Oh, do not worry; there is no space for two”

            He pointed the elongated cannon to some random direction in the forest, extended his arms and pulled two small legs by the side of the weapon to then dropped it, making the legs bury themselves into the earth under the weight of the contraption. Then he threw himself into the ground, lying flat, belly down, and pulled a third leg from the butt of the gun and with one single hit of his fist he buried it in the ground as well.

            “What are you doing?” asked Telescopica.

            “What everyone does” he pulled from his pocket an absolutely humongous shell and in three swift mechanical and well oiled movements he loaded it into the rifle “I’m making my way in life” he shot.

            Another explosion, this one not only threw her to the ground but sent her flying away a few meters until she landed on her but. Afterwards, if someone had told her that the rotation of the earth changed as a consequence of it she would have believed it.

            When she stood up the echoes of the blast hadn’t quite faded away yet. Once on her feet she could see what the effects of the projectile were. A path had been formed by all the trees that had been destroyed in the trail of the bullet, even the ground had been excavated into one deep ditch, easy to traverse. Kommando was folding back the legs of the weapon and hanging it on his back.

            “Let’s go!” he said with cheer “My house is this way!”

* * *

 

            She drank the soup in the small concrete kitchen, while Kommando cleaned his weapon in front of her.

            She tried to concentrate on the bowl and not on the pumping, hairy muscles of the man, which were stained by the occasional drop of oil. He was not voluminous but what little he had was chiseled and firm. But it wasn’t (only) his body what was distracting her. It was the way he handled his machine. Picking apart and then putting it back together with both swiftness and a delicacy that made it look like the gun was merely a toy. He almost juggled the different pieces and tools to keep the thing greased and clean. As a markswoman she ached to be able to handle that weapon if only for a few rounds, just to feel the kick in her bones, to see how she could carve the world with it.

            “You like it?” he asked, noticing her gaze.

            “It’s ridiculously big and impractical” she answered, maintaining her gaze without any rubor on her face “also it’s ridiculously phallic”

            “And what’s wrong with that?” he said, cocking the shaft very much on purpose “I love my dick just as much as I love my gun! They’re both part of me and they both make me happy!”

            She went back to her soup, not answering. She couldn’t distract herself like that. Yes, she needed food and a proper bed but that was it, she had already given herself a chance to relax a few days ago and it was much too early to start thinking about it again. All the same her mind started teasing her with the most inappropriate scenarios between her and Kommando.

            “And how did you got here anyway?” she asked trying to think of something else, anything else.

            By “here” she meant the room they were in, a full concrete construction, buried underground, below the petrified roots of the forest. A military base, one of the many left from the last war, built before the emperor took controls of those lands. They were mostly found near the edges of the frontier. Many of them had become refuges for the surviving soldiers of the war or for those who happened to find them. Yet finding them was not always a sign of good luck since many an army had lost their sanity trapped inside, guarding themselves from the emperor, if you happened to encounter a base and look on its insides you were likely to find tribalistic madmen whose confinement had degenerated into savagery or simply mass graves filled with mummified corpses. Yet this base in particular seemed to host only one occupant and none of the horrors that were so common to such places.

            “I was born here, my ma and pa were all part of a merry old group of good boys and girls with one duty, fight in the last war against the Tzar, yet when the time came they realized that their duty was merely a suicide mission so they holed up all nice and snug in here, all the boys and girls of the army, and here they stayed, taking care of each other” said Kommando, putting away his gun and crossing his arms on the surface of the metal table.

            “And how come they didn’t go insane?”

            “Because they allowed themselves to live and they allowed themselves to leave, unlike most bases this was well hidden in the middle of the forest so they could actually come out without any fear of being caught by the forces of the empire, they could have nice and fresh air get in their lungs and rich earth to crumble below their toes, and because they had me, I say I had a ma and pa but really I hade like a dozen ma’s and pa’s, taking care of a kid has a way to keep you grounded, or so I’m told”

            “You were raised by an army”

            “By a squad, and yes, they taught me everything I know”

            “And where are they now?”

           “Oh, they are very dead, I’m sorry to say” he looked away at the ceiling “they were old by the time the war ended, an army put together with whatever the world could find at the time, they call it the largest army known to man, but that was only in proportion of the people that were left after the emperor had been killing most of them”

            “I thought the emperor killed everyone in one single attack, when he cracked the world”

            “Well, history is not very well taught now a days, I was learned by a group of soldiers that actually fought in that war, and the way things went was that the emperor used his powers in relatively low scales before he cracked the world, his width of destruction was no bigger than a city or a small country, he went from nation to nation demanding that all control were surrendered to him and if they refused he wiped the state or province or whatever right there, after a while the countries started to catch on what was going on and started allying with him whilst the remaining nations scrambled to put together an opposition, by the way, do you want any more?” he said pointing at the empty bowl.

            “Yes, and continue, please”

            He stood up and took the bowl to the small, metallic kitchen behind him, filled with capsules and dehydrated packets of food. He started heating some water and continued.

            “Yes, so, by this point the empire was being formed with the cluster of countries he had managed to turn to his side, which was a sizable portion of the world, so the remaining countries all allied in one front as a single entity and put together this giant army and started sending them to the new empire, obviously they were all eradicated, just like that, and the power of the emperor grew” the water was boiling so he opened one of the packets and dropped a square capsule in it “now the emperor was furious at this, he was bad at handling rejection as you can see from how he treated those who refused to join him, but open hostility? That drove him nuts, so he went all the way to the center of the cluster of countries that still opposed him, some say he flew in a plane and then jumped, some say he went by foot, disguised as a normal teenage kid, which is how old he was at the time, and then he just waited.” He poured the soup on the bowl and took it back to Telescopica.

            “As I said the biggest possible army had been assembled and destroyed so they had to put together a second army with what was left, and since it was considered a part of the first army they still called it the largest one known to man, you see? So they all hurried to meet the emperor who was waiting there, in the middle of a desert, in the middle of enemy territory, the army went up to him, they surrounded him, they demanded surrender and he refused and then…well, nobody really knows what happened then”

            “He cracked the world”

            “Yes, he did, but why? It wasn’t necessary, is not like the army he was against was the size of the entire hemisphere, he could have wiped them out easily without having to crack the world, no, some say he lost control, some say that with every attack his power inevitably grew stronger, and some say he just miscalculated”

            “Miscalculated?”

            “Imagine what it must be like, to be in that situation, right? You are just a sixteen year old kid, you’ve been conquering countries, you have been killing millions and millions of people, literally the entire world hates you and then you are there, looking at the largest army ever put together, all surrounding you, all that hate weighing on you in its most physical form possible, he couldn’t have been a very stable person to begin with and that…well that would tip anyone beyond the edge and further”

            “You say he was a kid?”

            “Yep, the army wouldn’t stop repeating it over and over as a way to moralize the troops, ‘you are only fighting a spoiled brat’ and all that, didn't do much good in the end”

           She stood there silently, absorbing all of that information. She gave once glance at the gun the man carried, this had to be one of the last batch of experimental weapons developed in the last years of the army, newly developed means of destruction designed to stop the growing monster that was the Tzar. And it hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t even gotten close to enough.

            “So anyway” he said, leaning back into his metal chair “What about you?”

            She raised her gaze, looking at his eyes again.

            “What about me?”

            “Why are you wearing yourself so thin trying to catch this Harmonica gal?”

            “Because it is my mission” she said, without even thinking.

            “So is it like, your job? Are you a law upholder? A justiceperson?”

            “No” she said frowning.

            “Is it for a price? are you a bounty chaser seeking the pretty penny over the criminal’s head?”

            “No, is not because of that”

            “Revenge perhaps? She hurt you or yours?”

            “She…she did that but…”

           It wasn’t revenge. Whenever her mind wandered into fantasies of what happened AFTER she caught Harmonica there were no scenarios with punishment there. She didn’t want to make Harmonica suffer, she just wanted her to stop, she wanted to…

            “But what?” he said, interrupting her thoughts “Because it seems to me that this goes beyond merely a good Samaritan wanting to stop wickedness, if you are willing to push yourself this far…”

            “Yes, I want to stop her because…because she can’t keep doing what she is doing, she is hurting others and she is hurting herself!” she was getting slightly flustered.

            “Wait, so you care about her?”

            “OF COURSE I CARE!” she yelled out of nowhere, hitting the table with her fists and making the bowl and soup fall to the ground “SHE IS MY SISTER!”

            She looked at the man in silence, he didn’t say anything.

            As the quietness extended it slowly started to dawn on her. When had been the last time she had called Harmonica that, that she had acknowledged the relationship at all, to anyone? Months? Years? And suddenly emotion bursted in her breast. She had managed to hold back fear the first time and she had managed to hold back lust the second. But in the third time, this emotion that overcame her could not be shunted away or resisted. Tears started to flow. She tried to stop it, her extremities curled up against her body, shaking, and she sunk her head between her arms. But the convulsions where exploding from her chest and coming out her throat as the sounds of a drowning animal.

            Kommando stood up and extended his arms, yet not daring to touch the woman. He didn’t know what to say.

            “She is my sister…and look what she became” she sobbed tentatively, it was too late to hold back the feeling, so maybe by talking she could release it and get rid of it “she…she wasn’t like this before…she was nice and good, she, she, she…” another sob “she was a good girl!”

            “I’m sure she was” he said.

            “But now she is this and she…she shouldn’t…not just because she is hurting people but because…because someone so nice and innocent shouldn’t blight their soul like this!…she…she needs help…she needs my help…she needs me” this wasn’t making it better, if anything it was getting worse but she couldn’t stop now “she needs to go home…oh, my moon and stars, _I_ want to go home!” it was already too late. She started crying, wailing, howling. Saturating the small concrete room with her laments. She felt two arms wrapping around her and she did the same with the owner of the arms. She grabbed on to that person as a soldier who wraps himself around a grenade, trying to spare the world of its destruction. Much in the same way, she was trying to hold back her pain but it was as if the hug was somehow squeezing it out of her, pushing it away. And the pain kicked and screamed as it left her body and she kicked and screamed with it because moon and mirth and stars and the emperor and all the fucking fucked up and cracked world, she wanted to go home. She was tired and frustrated and she couldn’t take this any longer.

            “You can go home” he said “you can, just because she is your sister that doesn’t mean she is your responsibility, you did all that you could, no-one can blame you for that, but can go home if you want”

            She didn’t answer; she knew that wasn’t true but it felt good to hear it, so she just kept crying and hugging that beautiful man ever tighter. None of his had fixed anything. But once she finally got this out her, she could feel a little better about it, perhaps, once she finished getting rid of all these tears, she would see it was not that bad, and the weight was not as heavy. She still had a mission, yes, yet maybe she could allow herself to keep hugging this person a little longer, maybe even for the rest of the night.

            That would be nice.

* * *

 

           The next day a buried hatch opened in the middle of the forest and a woman came out from under it, followed by a man. They were both carrying similarly gigantic weapons, except hers looked a little less worn down by the years. She was also wearing new clothes; military grade camouflage pants, boots and a white tank top.

            “So, you know” the man was saying as he climbed his way out of the hatch “Just be careful with it, because I once saw the kickback of it rip a man’s spine, I’m sure you know your way around it and all but…I mean, just like anything it takes some time and some practice to get used to all its kinks”

            “Sure” she said, in a good mood. She seemed to enjoy listening to the man prattle on about the technicalities of the rifle.

            “So anyway, as I showed you on the maps, the, uh, the closest exit is in that direction, so…” he seemed nervous, flustered “uhm…good luck?”

            “Yes, thank you” she put a hand on his cheek “I might come back to visit some day”

            “Oh! Oh, yes, sure! Anytime you want!” he seemed really enthused about this.

            “Anyway, I got to go, I have a…sister…” it was still a little hard to say it but not as hard as yesterday “…to find”

            “Bye Telescopica!”

            “Good bye Kommando, may the moon dawn on you”

            She started walking away, the weight of the giant gun sitting comfortably on her shoulders. She was going to find Harmonica, and then she was going back home.


	13. Chapter 13

            Mud streets. Metal houses. Walls made of corrugated steel with no such things as glass windows or doors. No plumbing, and  if there was any electrical grid in here it would have been a haphazard bundle of wires tightly knotted with each other, one too many pigeon shit away from turning into a wildfire. This was the neighborhood wherein Hector resided, and only now, walking one last time towards his so called “friend’s” door, did the Foremost noticed all of these flaws. Every single detail and problem waiting to be fixed, one more metaphorical splinter indirectly caused by that crack that his brother had  put on the world thirty and five years ago. He had seen all of this before, countless times, and only now did it occur to him that someone ought to do something about it. Yes, something had to be done because people were suffering but also because people suffering meant people got angry and angry people revolted and overthrew governments. Except this government had a monster on top of it who would not hesitate to destroy the world as retaliation.

            The Foremost hated that this line of thought was becoming more and more repetitive with time, how it always all ended up leading back to his brother destroying the world as a terrible thing that had to be avoided when before it had been a mantle of protection, an assurance of their strength as siblings. A sense of security that they had so sorely lacked when they were kids. The Foremost remembered what it was like to live on the streets, what it was like to be scared every second of his life, until half the world was destroyed and then he saw that this power was on his side and ever since then he was scared no more. Until now.

            In that moment, standing in front of the door of Hector, he was scared. He was scared of a problem that for the first time he knew he couldn’t throw raw power at to solve.

            He walked inside the house unannounced as he used to. Inside he found Hector, as calm as always, this time joined by two black women, a middle aged one and an older one. This was the first time the Foremost ever saw them, though he didn’t had to think hard to tell who they were. Did Hector know why he was here? Maybe there was a chance he hadn’t found out, because maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t actually the leader of the rebellion. But the Hector said:

            “I guess you cam to arrest me?”

            The agent stood there, not having any chairs to sit on, trying to absorb the news.

            “I suppose it was too much to ask for you to ignore that as well” the black man said, drinking from a metal cup with a herbal infusion.

            “Was I included as well?” asked the Foremost finally “Had I stayed here would I have been targeted by rebellion attacks?”

            “No” the Foremost dared not hold hope at this, knowing there was a ‘but’ coming “you would have been killed last, I would have invited you here and I would have offered you a drink and this would have been poison” and yet despite him not daring to hope, the truth hurt all the same.

            “I see” said the officer, and without fully managing to keep the spite out of his voice he went on “and here I am thinking that we are friends”

            “If you ever actually thought that you were an idiot” Hector said without making the least effort to keep the loathing of his response. “How could we ever? You really, honestly believed there was any actual kinship between the two of us? Any form of honest closeness at all? You must have realized you were merely buying my company with supplies to survive, supplies that I should have been able to acquire by myself in any true, sane world, but no”

            “I gave you food and stuff because you were my friend, not other way around” insisted the Foremost.

            “And if I hadn’t been your friend? If I hadn’t been friendly at all but yet another dour walking corpse like the rest of the citizens in your oh-so-glorious empire? Would you have even spared me a second glance? I was amiable, yes, gregarious even, because it was the only way for me and my family to survive, to dance like the jester of the king so we could eat every week, but no, there could have never been any real friendship between us”

            At this point the Foremost should have left, there was nothing else to say on any capacity, either personal or official. Official in particular because the Foremost paying a visit to a known criminal about to be committed was merely an archaic technicality that he had taken advantage of to have this conversation that was proving to be fruitless. And yet, despite any semblance of pride that he might have wanted to keep, he persisted.

            “I changed…” he said, feeling pathetic “I care now; I want to make empire better place for everyone…”

            “You said you changed and yet look at yourself, you are here in what is supposedly a ‘friendly conversation’ but how can we have that when you insist to carry that which sets you above every one of us? That which gives you monstrous power over the lives of you peers?”

            “You want me to get rid of uniform?” the Foremost said, confused, putting his hands on the impeccable, buttoned up jacket he carried everywhere.

            “I’m talking about your weapon”

            “My…? Oh, yes, I see”

            He raised his hand to his glasses, the middle aged woman instinctively bent forwards like she wanted to put herself between the shades and her husband, but all the Foremost did was remove the glasses from his face and put them in his breast pocket. His eyes were naked and if they looked odd to the three people in front of him they said nothing.

            “I am not wearing any weapons, I am just like you now” he said.

            “No you’re not, you still don’t understand” Hector said.

            “Then help understand, I really want to do better”

            Hector narrowed his eyebrows a bit, for the first time his gaze of cold indifference changed. The two women next to him kept on looking at the officer with disgust.

            “Very well, let me tell you a story then”

            The wife looked at her husband in confusion but the older lady simply closed her eyes as if she already knew the story, as if, indeed she had used to be the one who told it over and over.

            “Many, many years ago lived a man with many, many children. The man was poor and he and his children were starving, but this was not this way because of indolence, no, he was poor because like his father and his father’s father he had been born poor, he had been created within a vicious cycle from which he couldn’t escape, where to try and acquire the resources to improve his situation already cost more resources than what he had, which where none, nothing can be created out of nothing, and nothing is what he had. So he took to do any and all jobs he could find, those that no-one else deigned to do, those that would break both the body and the spirit of less desperate men who worked for themselves alone, but he wasn’t doing this for his survival, all this was so his children could eat and he would starve day in and day out, as he tirelessly worked on hellish tasks, trying to accumulate enough money to provide in his household, the only money he would spend on his own nutrition was the bare minimal not to die, and not a single coin more.

Amongst these miserable jobs, beggar was one, one he did on his spare time, on those days he couldn’t find anything else at all, not a single ditch to dig or a public bathroom to clean or even a measly bit of trash to collect. So he would go about the streets, trying to perform what little tricks he knew to perhaps entertain the public and get a penny or two, if not out of gratitude for the entertainment at the very least out of pity, that he wasn’t above that at all.

One day, as he was begging on a crowded street, something most unusual happened. The king of the land passed by. He was being carried on his palanquin, high and mighty as a king ought to be, when he saw the skeletical man, pleading to anyone who would listen, for just a tiny bit of charity. The King decided right then and there to stop and talk with the poor man.

‘You! Vagrant that pleads on the streets of my kingdom!’ said the king ‘Do you believe yourself greater than me in anyway?’

            ‘Not at all my lord!’ claimed the poor man, who knew his monarch to be a twisted, cruel man and inwardly cursed his crooked fate that would submit him to the whims of that hideous man.

            ‘Yet look at you begging! Are you not desperate to procure food with what you’ll manage to snatch from my honest working citizens?’ the alleged where giving a wide berth to the conversation for no-one wanted to be caught staring while the king amused himself with some unfortunate soul.

            ‘Y-yes, my lord’ said the impoverished man, not knowing what else to say but the truth.

            ‘Ha! So you see, by your actions you are doing nothing less but proudly proclaim that your hunger is greater than mine, a grave insult, no less, for what is hunger but the sister of gluttony, of ambition and thus a close relative to pride? And from all things that I am proud of, my own pride is the biggest one! Are you insulting my pride, you miserable knave? Are you claiming your hunger to be bigger than mine?’

            To this the poor man couldn’t do any less but to bristle, for he was not above many things, not many at all, and yet even for someone as wretched as he was, the utter insult of being denied from his own misery, to declare that for etiquette and politeness sake towards the king he couldn’t outwardly show his suffering, was an offense beyond tolerance, so he replied, as tall as his heavy back allowed him.

            ‘Yes! I do proclaim my hunger to be bigger than yours, indeed I declare my want to be larger, my need to be deeper and my wishes to be higher than anything you, that already live at the top, could ever imagine!’

            ‘So be it then’ answered the monarch, gregarious and seemingly undisturbed by the beggar’s attitude ‘if such high a claim you wish to make then let us put it to the test, shall we not? A contest! Tomorrow to be carried in the public plaza between you and me!’

            ‘A contest?’ said the man, with cautiousness for his outburst had come and left and now his cooler head was prevailing, making him realize the situation he might be putting himself through ‘what kind of contest?’

            ‘Why, an eating contest, of course! So we can all see whose hunger is larger! We’ll meet tomorrow in front of the largest feast this kingdom has ever seen and he who manages to consume it all will be the winner! Shall you win rest assured neither you or yours will ever experience hunger again for I will provide for, as a payment for my defeat’

            ‘And if I loose?’

            ‘Oh nothing at all but the shame of knowing you were wrong, that I am a merciful king and would not ask you to endure more than you can bear’

            Perhaps it was desperation, perhaps it was hubris, or perhaps it was honest confidence that, fat and filled as the king was, and hungry and thin as he himself was, the victor would be obvious. Perhaps he felt he hadn’t much time left and would grab to any opportunity to ensure his children’s future, even one too good to be true such as this. Whatever the case might be the man accepted and the next day he was sitting in the public plaza of the city, at a table with more food than he had ever seen in his life. The king was sitting next to him, on a table just as full, and the whole town was around them to witness this event. Even the poor man’s children, who, young as they were, awaited eagerly to hug and congratulate their father when the inevitable victory came.

            The contest began and both men began to consume. At first the beggar felt delighted, as he finally allowed himself to indulge in luxuries previously unbeknownst to him, pleasures of which he had only heard wild whispers in fever dreams. Foods from all sorts and flavors and none tasted bad for his tongue was the lenient one of the starved. He was happy for the first few minutes until something caught his eyes. His children, they were there and they were watching, he could see the frenzied look of eagerness on their faces as he stuffed himself and then shame descended upon him, almost making him choke on a turkey leg he was chewing. How could he be here, stuffing his belly, while his sons and daughters slowly died of empty bellies right in front of him? So this was the cruel game of the evil king, he thought, to lay this cruel irony, to torture him, to force him to satisfy himself while guilt consumed him from the inside. Perhaps the king was waiting for him to crack, to break in tears right there, to maybe even try to give the food away to his children thus loosing the contest.

            But he wasn’t going to do that, for he was smarter. No, he had done terrible things to provide for his children in the past and he could do this as well. The monarch was underestimating the man he was dealing with, how truly starved he could be, how much he could consume for all those times that he had not. And the contest proceeded without a hitch.

            And then something he never thought possible occurred, a sensation he had never truly experienced in his life. A tightness on his loins, and clamp in his throat, a slight sense of nausea. Was the food supposed to be poisoned so he couldn’t win one way or the other? But no, this was not it, this was…this feeling…he was full. He didn’t need to eat anymore; he could not eat any more. His body hosted as much matter within as it could and would not accept an ounce more. But the king was still eating. How could it be? Was this trickery of some sort? It couldn’t, the delicacies were disappearing in the man’s mouth for everyone to see. The king was somehow not filled yet, and this was unacceptable, the beggar had to keep eating lest he loose the contest. So he kept eating, even though he couldn’t, even though his body was asking him to stop, he pushed the food down his throat all the same since to do anything else would be to loose. He ate and then he swallowed his own puke and then he kept eating, feverishly, desperate. He noticed the looks on his children, he noticed how the horror was slowly dawning on their faces as they saw his father slowing down and the king not stopping, laying waste on his table, a juggernaut of a mouth, endlessly stuffing itself beyond comprehension. And the beggar tried to keep up and he couldn’t, his hands were shaking, his skin felt oily and covered in sweat, drool was falling from the sides of his mouth and he could almost feel the half chewed food piling up on his neck and he trying desperately to push it down with even more food, because he had to, because there was no other choice to do it, because if he didn’t do it his children would die.

            Eventually he couldn’t take it anymore, his extremities stopped responding all together and he fell on the table. He wasn’t so much puking as more like the food was just flowing out of him because it simply couldn’t go inside. A small, uninterrupted stream of bilis streamed through the table from his mouth. The King stood, three times as large as he had been before the contest ended and walked up to him, wobbling proudly.

            ‘So you see? You, that had nothing, have no understanding of what is to hold much, your stomach is shriveled, you are weak and only dream of having enough, but me, that was born with everything, will always dream of having more, my hunger will always be bigger than your or your kind, and now you lose, good day sir’ and with a final chuckle the king just walked away. As did everyone else, now that the event was over.

            The kids dragged the barely conscious body of his father back to the hole where they lived. He didn’t even have enough wits to fully understand what was happening, he couldn’t even listen to his kids trying to console him as they tried to hold back their tears. The man died that night. Most of the kids followed suit in the following weeks. And the king lived for many, many more years. The end”

            Hector finished telling his story.

            “Did all children died?” asked the Foremost after a brief moment of silence.

            “No” said the old woman, next to Hector “one of his daughters survived”

            “It is very tragic” the Foremost said “but I fail to understand meaning”

            “Then I will explain”  said the middle aged woman “you claim that you are equal to us, but that is just false pretense, a way to make tabula rasa and forget all the atrocities committed to us and the people that came before, equal” she insisted “as if what we go through is comparable to what you go through, as if we have the same needs, the same wants, both the beggar and the king got the exact same feast, as if they were equals, as if getting the same thing was actually fair for both, yet one of them died, equality is a lie, a nice story that does not apply to reality, you say we are equal and you insult us, for you deserve far, far less than what we have”

            The Foremost was looking at the ground by this point, standing there, in the middle of that dirty room, faced by those three people, he felt much smaller than he ever felt facing an army. At last he said.

            “I can save you”

            Hector raised an eyebrow.

            “Rectifiers are coming to get you and execute you right now, they’ll be here any moment, but if we hurry I can help escape, I will incur on anger of politicians, Tzar will be displeased…but this is irrelevant, I can get you out of capital, you can go away and hide in small town, I know place where you can go”

            The couple tightened the grip on their hands.

            “You would do this?” Hector said, and for the first time his voice sounded a lot softer. Like he was finally breathing again. A shadow of a smile was suggesting itself on the face of the old woman. The general posture of all three of them was much more relaxed.

            “Yes…but I can not say the same for children”

            The couple tensed back again.

            “What?”

            “If you disappear, rectifiers will come back for family, for interrogation and such, I could try hold them back but I would be challenging Tzar far beyond what would be reasonable, it would be massacre, at end of which emperor himself will step in and then everyone looses”

            “But…”

            “I cannot help them sneak away either, I just do not have logistics, there is not enough supplies or means of transportation, not enough to go away with many people unnoticed, there would be confrontation and I cannot protect everyone, I cannot be everywhere at same time, by moment I finish dropping you off in place you can be safe rectifiers would have already come and captured your family”

            “So then that’s it? You’re not helping?”

            “If you surrender, Tzar will be satisfied, and your family will be left alone, and I will be able to still give them food and supplies for as long as I can”

            “And what happens to me?”

            The Foremost finally raised his gaze, showing his eyes, his strange, peculiar eyes. With irises that one would have sworn sparkled had they been submerged in darkness.

            “You die, executed by empire”

            The man looked at his wife, a resigned look on his face.

            “And I’m supposed to accept, because it’s the best option for my family?”

            “Yes”

            “Just like wining that contest was the best option for the beggar?”

            “Ye-no, I mean…”

            “After which everything goes back to the way it was before, and you can alleviate your conscience by giving supplies to my family like you always did, the powerful remain powerful, the oppressed remain oppressed, nothing changes except I will no longer be here to make things awkward for you”

            “It is only option I can think of!” The Foremost said, desperate, frustrated and yes, even a bit angry.

            “I can think of another option”

            Then the Foremost felt something piercing him on his back, all the air went out from his lungs. There was a sensation of something tearing at his torso, except it was not from a foreign object penetrating him; the sensation came from the inside out. A fire, a lightning, perpetually striking him on the ribs. He turned around as the three people standing behind him stood up. He saw, on the entrance to the small house a kid, who resembled both Hector and the middle aged woman. The child was holding the handle of a knife but there was no blade there, at the point where the steel should have been there was just a molten mass of metal and plastic. The kid was looking at him terrified.

            “Oh no” said the woman

            “It seems we miscalculated” said Hector.

            The Foremost turned around again, like a dog chasing his own tail, and faced the black man.

            “Y-you…you tried…” said the officer, stupefied.

            “Stand back” said Hector, trying to guard the two women next to him with his arms.

            “Dad? What’s going on?” asked the kid, scared out of his wits.

            “Run my son! Grab your siblings and run!”

            The Foremost was starting to shake; the shadows in the room were dancing all around. The feeling of lighting on his backside was not merely a sensation. Light, sickening white light, was pouring forth from his wound.

            “What have you done?” the Foremost asked and his voice came out hollow, with far too many echoes for such a confined space, which at every second seemed to grow smaller “I…I must fall unconscious…I have to be put down!” now there were more lights shining through him. Blinking from his mouth every time he opened and closed his lips, from his nostrils, from his ears, and above all else from his eyes.

            “What is this?” asked Hector, his eyes wide, threatening to bulge out of his face, out of astonishment.

            “The emperor’s mirth” the Foremost said. With shaking hands he put his shades back. His irises were still perfectly visible, blindingly so, from behind the dark crystals. He stumbled out of the house, pushing the kid that was in his way to the side. The boy’s skin was instantly burned where the Foremost’s hand touched it. He made it into the dirty, impoverished streets.

            His walk was halting, he moved in fits and with every step more of the pale flashes danced around him, and the brightest one of all was the flash at his back. Thirty five years had passed since the last time the world had seen this light on its surface. Darkened, scorched marks were left in the ground through which the man walked, a smell of ozone was forming around him. Finally he fell on his knees unable to go on. He knew what was coming, he claimed in the past that he was not as powerful as the emperor but now that was about to be put to the test. Once this was over, the world might not be standing anymore.

            A group of men in uniforms surrounded him, led by a man with huge shoulder pads and a sardonic smile on his face. The rectifiers had arrived.

            “Well, look at you Foremost citizen, it seems the locals have been unkind”

            “I…I need to fall unconscious…or world…world might be over…”

            “Yeah, yeah, I know, standard protocol, thirty five years and this is the first time it has to be put to the test, eh?” the man pulled out his regulatory beating stick “this is what you get for being noble, Jerry”

            The ground where he laid on his knees was starting to crack.

            “J…just hurry…and…only…only punish the leader…leave the family alone…that is an order”

            “As you command, Foremost citizen” said the Rectifier, raising his arm.

            The hit almost cracked his skull.


	14. Chapter 14

            “Alright, now, put his hand in your mouth!”

            “P-please…I beg you; I’ll do anything…anything at…”

            “SHUT UP!” yelled Karachay to the man who was already missing an arm and was bleeding all over the ground.

            “Yeah! Shut up and put your hand in my mouth!” yelled the young, blonde woman, in turn. The ongoing whimpering and debasing made it obvious the man was not about to comply so she decided to take maters literally into her own hands and grabbed the victim’s fingers so she could tightly hold them with her teeth. Karachay pointed carefully at both of them.

            “Bang”

            The man’s other arm also blew up, now leaving him completely handless. He stumbled back screaming in pain but he was ignored by the two criminals who were far more interested in something else. The girl was spitting fingers, perfectly untarnished fingers.

            “IT WORKS! By stars and mirth and all the bloody organs I ever collected, it fucking works!” yelled the man.

            “I just want to say, this is fucken’ neato” agreed the girl.

            They where jumping and dancing around the pile of bodies they had been collecting for the past hour or so. The discovery of Harmonica’s talent had demanded further testing, in the name of furthering the scientific progress of the empire and such. And what would be testing without a few unwilling test subjects? Not much testing at all. This was science, mirth dammit, and as it had always been the case across human history, it was being furthered at the expense of the ignorant masses.

            This had been a small farming village, mainly dedicated to creating all the food to feed the government with only a few measly scraps going to the farmers themselves. The need to keep the harvest uncontaminated, made it so that the place was the closest settlement to the capital. This was usually the last stop for the tax collector (also known as “the bandit”) before reaching his brother’s home every time he went visiting. He always made sure to take the same weight of food, no matter when had been the last time he had visited or how much food it had been harvested, nutrients were going to be acquired, sometimes in the form of human flesh, but then again, not many objected to sustain themselves on that considering it was one of the few dwindling resources left on this world.

            But, once again, this time around Karachay was not interested in collecting his several pounds of flesh. This time he just wanted to see how far Harmonica’s immunity to his powers went. Apparently it was plenty. Seven bodies in total indicated that you could protect yourself from the bandit’s blasts if you stood behind her or inside her, not so much if you stood beside, in front, or just generally around, which was obvious in hindsight but Karachay wanted an excuse to shoot some people. The psychopaths high-fived.

            “You, my sumptuous gal pal, are like the sister I never had” said Karachay, enjoying himself, literally.

            “Yes, you are also like the sister I never had!” replied the girl.

            “Excuse me?”

            “As in, I never had a sister that looked as ugly as you”

            “Oh, I see”

            “Or smelled as bad”

            “Yes, I know”

            “Or had a dick that small”

            “What? This is small to you?” he said pulling it out for her to see.

            “All I’m saying is I’ve seen larger”

            He looked at her, indignated, in the ironic I’m-being-honest-but-not-really-but-actually-yes way that friends are known to do.

            “Any way, where is the flare gun?” said Harmonica, stopping her silly jig for a second to address important matters.

            “No idea, you’ll have to ask the boys” said Karachay without stopping.

            The boys where at that moment busy carrying bags of freshly collected meat into the two vehicular abominations left that they used to move around the wasteland. She sauntered over there and asked.

            “Hey! Any o’you fuckos have seen the flare gun?”

            “There is only one Fucko here” replied the men who answered by that name “and yes, he has, it’s in that car over there, but let me tell you, it’s got only one load left and we are still a ways away from the capital”

            “Ya, naw, mah sister’s going to see it all the same, she has eyes for days”

            “If you say so, as far as I saw she had only one eye in good conditions”

            “Yes, she’s special like that, also, what you fuckers going to be doing with the people there?”

            She pointed not at the lumps of flesh they were loading inside the car but at the small cabin where the remaining members of the farm were hidden, hoping against hope that the big bad people would just go away and leave them alone so they could properly grieve their losses and move on with their short lives.

            “Nothing at all, we have to leave some folks alive to take care of this place so there is food and more people next time we come”

            “Oh! Goodie! May I pay them a visit? I swear swear swear I won’t kill any of them I just want to talk, pretty please?”

            “You gotta ask the boss”

            She turned around and screamed.

            “HEY SHITFACE! CAN I GO HAVE FUN WITH THE PEOPLE IN THE FARM? I WONT KILL ANYONE, PINKY SWEAR!”

            The alleged shitface was at that moment busy rendering the remaining dead bodies to pasty red chunks with his powers and simply said.

            “SURE, GO HAVE FUN!”

            “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!”

            And up to the cabin she went. She got inside and closed the door behind so no-one outside could see or hear what was going on inside.

            A little while later she came out of the building wagging her ass to the sides as is she was trying to emulate a happy dog. No-one asked her what she did in there.

         She grabbed the flare gun and pointed it at the sky. A column of red smoke rose vertically, ascending high up to the clouds, at the tip of it a new star was shining, beckoning anyone who could see it from miles around to come to where they stood.

            “Ok boss” said Baulder, packing in the last of their load “We’re done here”

            “Good! Me too!” Karachay was pulling his pants up after finishing taking a shit on the pinky mush that he had left of the corpses. He turned to the cabin and yelled “UNTIL NEXT TIME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN”

            The whole crew climbed the gigantic apparatuses and with a thunderstorm of engines, both in noise and dark clouds, they left the place. Karachay took one last sight of the farm and the rising column of the beacon they had left behind.

            “And you’re sure your sister will be able to follow the trail we leave behind?” he asked.

            “Buddy” Harmonica replied, putting one hand on one of his badly shaven cheeks “she’s Telescopica, if anything the beacons are redundant, she’ll find me one way or the other, and you better be sure she does so at the capital with reinforcements and shit all round you because she ain’t going to stop until she gets me” her face was getting closer and more intense with every word “nothing shall stop her and woe is whosoever that dares stand on her path”

            “Yeah, yeah, that’s the plan, shut the fuck up” he said, in a good mood, as he playfully pushed her face away with a grimy hand.

            The cars got lost in the distance and the ranch was quiet once again.

            A couple of minutes later people started to walk out the door of the cabin, slowly, shyly, unsure that the nightmare was over. The only one with any certainty in her step was an older woman, tanned and thick skinned after years and years of working under the sun. She went directly up to the smelling, decomposing heap that used to be members of her family, looked at the remains and let out a heavy sigh. She stood like that a few seconds until a young boy finally dared come and interrupt her.

            “You think Harmonica was telling the truth?” he said.

            “What? That she wanted to help?” said the old woman “don’t be daft, she is a rabid, sadistic creature, incapable of understanding the needs of others, no, boy, she just has a new victim in mind, the bandit, our little rebellion is just the her weapon of choice”

            “Still, she is going to take the message and assist our cells at the capital!”

           “Yes, she will, but do not think for a second that once her job is done she wont turn back on us, hopefully the boys in the city will be guarded against her tricks, hopefully Hector’s faction wont die after killing their target and they’ll manage to lend a hand in taking down that little beast”

            “Hector was in charge of taking down the politicians and the Foremost, right?”

            “No, kid, only the Foremost, the politicians are just meant to call his attention”

            “And who was in charge of taking down the bandit then?”

            The old woman finally managed to pry her eyes from the red shapeless gunk that used to be people and she looked at the horizon, where a cloud of smog was sinking.

            “That would be Ginna”

* * *

 

            From miles away a woman saw the little flare, floating above. She gripped her humongous weapon harder and kept on walking.

* * *

 

            “Ya know, I think I have a theory” said Karachay.

            “Good for you” answered Harmonica.

            The capital was nearing and nothing had been said for hours amidst the cacophony that was the perpetual revving of the engines. After a while of riding those vehicles one entered an almost meditative state wherein the vibrations, the noise and the constant, unchanging landscape, passing through at a hundred miles per hour, reduced all your thought processes to naught. Because of this Harmonica herself had been uncharacteristically quiet most of the trip. It was remarkable that the Bandit had been capable at all of forming “a theory”.

            “I know why you are immune to my power” he went on.

            “Uh, because you suck?” she said.

            “Besides, look, I’m not a stupid person you know?”

            She saw the deranged man in front of her, looking at her with a stare that was far too intense. The reverberations of the car made his head vibrate making spittle fly all over the place.

            “Sure”

            “I’m not! I could be like brother dear! Or in the position of any of those stupid ass politicians and busybodies, pushing paper around but you see, I choose to be here, as the tax collector…”

            “As the bandit”

            “As the motherfucking bandit, you’re rooting tooting right! And why? Because they are much more liable to make their own enemies, those idiots, they stay in one place, making the same people miserable over and over, so obviously those poor miserable fucks will rebel at one time or another”

            She kept her eyes firm, had she been anyone else, say, someone who was capable of feeling guilty or having second thoughts at all, she might have flinched, she might have started sweating, she might have even darted suspicious looks every which way, but just as she could have her pulse steady while pealing off the gums of a child, she could stay chill here.

            “What I’m getting at is that powerful dickheads create their means of destruction every other day, and my big bro, Tzar, is no difference”

            “Fascinating! Truly riveting, oh daddy, you could tell me tales of wonder and yonder all day without end and I wouldn’t want to blow my brains off of boredom at all!” she replied, whilst making a wanking motion with her fist.

            “You little sassy bitch, I’m getting to my point, would I be wrong in guessing that you are thirty five years old?”

            “Yes”

            “Oh?”

            “I’m thirty four and three months old, thank you very much!”

            He looked at her for a few seconds and then slapped her across the face, with the back of his hand, hard enough to draw blood.

            “So as I was saying” he went on “thirty five years ago Tzar unleashed his mirth on the world and buddy, such energies change the planet, in more ways than just the obvious, it stands to reason that most pregnancies were affected by that, such as making the fetus resilient to those powers!”

            “Sho ish dat eashy?” she said, with a swollen cheek in furious red.

            “Of course it fucking ain’t! Most babies that year were either aborted or born with horrible deformities, or too weak and frail to live! Only parents with considerable resources would have been able to provide for care good enough so that the little delicate shits could have survived, and back then, right after the war, the only ones who had that kind of luxuries were, first of all, royalty, and second, living near the empire”

            This time she actually did flinch just a little.

            “Which leads me to my second point” he said with a smirk widening across his already much distorted face “you are not just some random psycho from the kingdom of the dawning moon…you are a princess, you are THE princess of the kingdom, the one everyone said we killed, and now we have you, we actually for real, no bullshit, have you” He puffed out his chest. “See how I told you I’m not stupid?”

            “Well, I mean, shou are” she said, face still swollen, teeth looser “shou are a dumb phucking shtupid shretarded, phrain dead, idiot moron baby wish zhit in his head and an assh phor a mouff”

            He raised his other hand.

            “Im the shounger shister, dumbash! My older shister ish the actshual prinshess!”

            He put down his hand.

            “I see”

            He raised it and hit her again.

            “Don’t call me a dumbass”

            “Can I shtill call you a dumb phucking shtupid shretarded, phrain dead, idiot moron baby wish zhit in his head and an assh phor a mouff?”

            “Yes, actually, you can”

            “Oh, you’re sho cool!” her tone was that of adoration, yet her expression was clearly a disparaging one.

            “I know baby” much in the same way, the smugness of his tone didn’t match the irony in his face. They were both fooling around, the insults and the violence where just a part of the game.

            “Den let me tshell shou something shou don’t kno’ shet”

            “What is that?”

            “Shou are about to die!”

            “BOSS THERE IS SOMETHING ON THE ROA…” Baulder didn’t finish the sentence because there was, in fact, something on the road and that something was a barbed wire that had been suddenly thrown from behind a bush towards another bush at the other side of the street, and this had happened just a few seconds before the vehicles passed there.

            The mechanical monstrosities skidded across the asphalt after their tires exploded, their center of gravity being thrown all over the place due to all the decorations and excesses in design they possessed. The things toppled and then they toppled again, and then they just kept on rolling and flipping over, crashing and flattening every part of themselves. Until much like a bee hive that has been emptied, they stopped rolling and revving. Finally the machines came to rest on the ground, many meters away from the pavement, turned off. Silence reigned on the road.

            From behind the bushes a group of men and women came out, sporting blades and knives and ropes, ready to subdue any survivors. They stood a few paces away from the wreckage and waited for anyone to surface.

            Only the wind blew in the silence of the desert. One of the cars was as silent as the corpses crushed inside, whereas in the other a soft stirring noise could be heard. Then a woman crawled from under the twisted metal, covered in dirt, her attire ruined and her face hurt but otherwise unscathed. She stumbled around, watched by the rebel forces, waving her arms around, her tattered clothes flowing in the breeze, trying to regain balance. Finally she managed to stay still and said.

            “Well, he’s pissed now”

            The destroyed vehicle from which she emerged exploded into the air making oxidized iron and steel rain from above. On the ground, surrounded by a ring of ruined car parts, stood Karachay, one arm extended to the sky. He looked feral. His arm started to come down so it could point at the responsible for his accident when the young blonde woman jumped on him, arms and legs extended, and wrapped herself on his body like a rabid koala, keeping his arm trapped between their bodies.

            “You ain’t doing shit honey!” she yelled “Come on, you fuckers” se said to the rebels “I come from Tara’s farm! Come and take him, I can keep him neutralized!”

            The man managed not to fall to the ground with the entire weight of Harmonica clinging to his torso, but he started twisting and pulling, trying to get rid of her. If he tried to use his power to attack anyone her body caught all of it, making it harmless.

            “GET OFF!!! GET OFF ME YOU FUCKING BITCH ASS CUNT!!!LET ME FUCKING GO YOU, YOU CUNT, YOU VAGINA, YOU MIRTHDAMNED PUTRID CLITORIS!!!”

            She gave him a quick peck on the lips. This made him take pause and stare at her flabbergasted.

            “Ew!” he said “That’s gross”

            She took the chance then to headbutt him and this made him fall to the ground. Meanwhile the rebel group had managed to surround them. The brave men and women grabbed Karachay’s arms and extended them above his head so that he would point to the horizon and away from them, they did much the same with his feet and then, with the ropes and some stakes, they tied the man to the ground, extremities stretched and Harmonica still on top of him. The bandit was subdued.

            “Great work, lady!” said one of the rebels to the girl “you have done something great today, I never saw anyone stand up to the bandit like that” the guy who said this extended an arm to Harmonica to help her stand up but she took a while to remain on top of the bandit, face up, as if he were the most comfortable pillow on the world.

            “Oh, it was no big deal” she said “Call it a service to the community” she winked her eye with a sly smile.

            The other rebels were celebrating and cheering that they had managed to capture their objective. Karachay was shooting blasts out of his fingers while grunting and struggling to get free, but the explosions only reached the ground a few feet next to him, without hurting anyone. Harmonica stood up, brushed up the dirt of her destroyed clothing and put a feet on top of the prisoner’s belly, much like a hunter on top of his recently captured prey.

            “So whacha gonna do now? Kill him? Torture him? Rape him, perhaps?”

            “What?” asked one of the rebels.

            “We are not doing any of that” answered another “we believe that the most fitting punishment is to neuter him”

            “AWESOME!” she said “So it’s going to be the balls or you’re taking the dick off too?”

            This earned her some weird looks from the people around her, not including the man on the ground, who just rolled his eyes.

            “I meant we are going to take away the use of his powers”

            “Oh, but leaving him otherwise alive! I see the psychological angle here! Nice!” Harmonica answered, tapping her forehead with her finger.

            “Hammond!” said another of the rebels “get your blade ready”.

            Hammond seemed to be some big burly guy with a machete who walked up to Karachay, slowly, enjoying the moment. His prisoner had finished struggling and now laid quietly on the ground, looking at the man who was moving towards him.

            “Is that shit even sharp?” the bandit asked.

            “No it is not” answered Hammond, with a crooked smile.

            “For all your crimes!” said one of the rebels “for all the horror you inflicted upon this land, for all the deaths and unspeakable atrocities committed against us and our people, we punish you!” everyone had formed a circle around the tied man on the ground “we punish you with incapacity, we punish you with mutilation, we punish you with pain and humiliation and a life time as a harmless beggar, to be kicked, to be spurred, to be shamed and mocked and ignored until you die, alone and forgotten on the streets of the empire you once terrorized, we punish you!”

            And for all of this, the bandit seemed strangely calm, and if Harmonica noticed it, she said nothing.

            “Throw down your blade, Hammond!”

            The machete came down and collided with Karachay’s wrists.

            And the light was poured upon this earth.

            Everyone stood back, suddenly blinded. Hammond particularly was grabbing his hand in pain since molten metal was running down from the handle he was holding. The blazing chaos was filtering into the world and a laughter, a laughter with echoes that resonated here, in the dry plains, where no echo should had been heard, spread around and engulfed them.

            When they finally gathered their wits they saw Karachay, using the light that was pouring from the gash on his wrists to destroy the ropes that were holding him down. He stood up, arms extended to the sides, from which blood was dripping, and wherever this cursed ooze touched the ground this was burnt to ashes.

            “You guys…really thought I needed my hands…?” his breath was haggard, his chest reverberated with every intake of air and wheezed with every exhalation “Do you even think my brother needs his glasses, for that matter?” the monster smiled “well, congratulations…you guys did it, you outdid it, you…you exceeded expectations, you outperformed yourselves, good job! Really, just, top notch, you know what? I hope you’re proud, I hope you are really proud of what you accomplished today, I hope you can all feel really good about this and pat yourselves on the back, because you guys, you did nothing wrong, not at all! You were right, you were one hundred percent right, all along, nothing should have been done different and I hope you can all look back and feel like you made the right choices! I really, really hope…well, I just hope you know, that you were right, and in the end, that is all that matters, that is all that fucking matters, that you…” as he spoke, light was starting to pour out of his mouth and his ears and eyes and nostrils and asshole and fingers and toes and nipples and navel and just about from everywhere in his body. He waved one arm around, splashing blood all over the place “and you!” he waved the other arm, splashing even more blood, people were falling on the ground writhing in agony since parts of their flesh were melting off, stained by the monster’s blood “and all of you! Feel good! Feel happy! I hope you feel…mirthful!”

            And the floor was cracking and sinking, turning into a crater. And the light was expanding and swallowing the circle of people who where no longer screaming but laughing and their laughter was not the mere cackles of the mad but melodies of the angels, they were singing, hosanna and happiness and gladness and ambrosia and mirth, mirth, mirth. For their souls were engorged and within this transmutation of essence there was only mirth, there was only transcendental glow, there was the spark of true and that which was holy. But oh! Their brains, they were only matter, and so hormones had to be produced to translate this into coherent physiological input and thus oxitocin was being churned out of their lobes, and more and more, to match their animas, and more and more, the chemical of happiness was overriding their bodies, swelling their veins, inflating their skulls, the hormones where leaking through their ears and nostrils and bulging out their eyes and their bodies expanded until the tensile strength of mere mortal skin could hold their souls no longer and they exploded, but no blood was spilled for all had been used to make even more happiness hormones. Yet this was only but one example of the results of the joyous light, some had their skeletons rip away from their muscles and started dancing until they exploded in a cloud of calcium and some had their nerves grow out of their skin and tangle with each other in knots and some, some just stayed perfectly still and nobody knows what happened inside their minds. And all the while they were singing because after thirty five years, the light was back on this earth.

            Harmonica, the only one untouched, walked up to the man amidst the mirth and grabbed his brutish, badly shaven face simply to utter.

            “You are beautiful”

            “I know it baby” Karachay answered before finally exploding himself.

* * *

 

            From miles away a woman saw the pillar of white, rising to the heavens. She knew what it meant. It was time to throw caution out of the window.

            She pointed her titanic weapon to the ground and climbed on top of it, making sure to carefully aim to where she wanted to go.

            She pulled the trigger.


	15. Chapter 15

            A man without shades opened his eyes because the pain in his back was so intense that sleep could claim him no more. When he did this he was greeted by a rather big guy standing up next to his bed with a most anxious look on his face. And the man said.

            “Damn-fucking-nation, you leave me in charge for one fucking day and everything goes to shit”

            “Maurice…? What…what is that happened?” groggyness was making the Foremost citizen’s accent sound thicker than usual

            “What didn’t happen, motherfucker! Get up, get the fuck up and put on some clothes that we have shit to do today”

            “Please, stop cursing” what he meant to ask was to cease talking all together, but knowing Maurice this was going to be too much to ask, so he conformed with making the conversation be at least civil.

            He was in his room, a Spartan, concrete, industrial grade location, buried within the bowels of the emperor’s palace. The only concession to taste in that place was the gigantic sofa, made of red leather, standing next to a coffee table with a couple of books on top of it.

            “Oh, I apologize” said the burly man with sarcasm oozing out of his pores “is just that, you know, when people are faced with strenuous circumstances they tend to release stress by using obscene language, such as: fuck, shit, titty, piss, ass, crap, cock and balls, not necessarily in that order, mind you”

            “Yes so, now that you made point clear, stop and explain what happened”

            The Foremost was slowly crawling his way out of bed, his articulations were taking their time to build up momentum and properly lubricate themselves.

            “Well, you were stabbed for one, but I gather you already know that one”

            Memories came back to him, the light, the horror, the pain. Yes, he knew that.

            “What else?”

            “Mhmmm…let me think, oh well, I guess Chalalay captured Telescopica”

“Good! Good news!” said the Foremost with cheer.

“I wouldn’t know about that considering your brother is fucking dead, oh, I’m sorry, your dear, sweet sibling is defunct”

            “WHAT?” the Foremost stopped his slow leaning towards his clothes and looked at Maurice with a terrified expression on his face.

            “I’m talking about the bandit, Chalalalay”

            “Oh” the man looked at the ground, feeling momentarily relaxed and then guilty over his relaxation. Maurice seemed to know what he was thinking and had no problem saying it out loud.

            “I’m not going to say I feel bad about it, he never really came to our town, back when that place still existed, but we heard stories of the shit he got up to, so I have no compunction on saying this to your face, I think the world is a better place now that he is gone…but still, I figure he was your brother and you probably don’t feel that great about it”

            “He was criminal, he hurt people, I looked other way because I did not care” the Foremost was putting his uniform and insisted on not looking at the other guy while he did this “he was brother, yes, but he was…unlikable”

            “To put it mildly”

            “Yes, world is better place with him gone” he assured, while he buttoned up his jacket.

            “Uhm…not so sure about that…his death has left, shall we say, collateral damage”

            “What damage?”

            “Something close to a crater a mile wide…good news is that you were right, he wasn’t as powerful as you or Tzar, his death didn’t crack the world much further…so we have that”

            Whatever, there were more important concerns.

“What happened to leader of rebellion and his family?”

            “Oh they’re dead, they super dead, murdered, every single one of them, shot right in the head by our dutiful rectifiers, rotting six feet under, resting and deceased, forever”

            The Foremost knew that tone of voice and so he waited.

            “Except, you know, for the wife, the mother and the children, your officers are obedient, if nothing else”

            “Good” The Foremost finished brushing up and now stood straight and primed next to his employee, ready to start the day “We must go talk to Tzar”

            “Oh, yes, about that” said Maurice as he followed the Foremost across the halls “the guy was furious after what happened to you and Kakakaka, he’s talking about going to war and such, well, talking is being charitable, more like he’s emanating such concentrated waves of hatred that it’s making the air vibrate and our ears are picking it up as coherent noise merely by chance”

            “You talked to Tzar?”

            “I mean, somebody had to, all the other assholes in this palace were shitting their pants to the prospect of facing the emperor after what happened to you, but if nobody did anything the guy would have probably blown up the world already, so…uh…I talked him into waiting until you recovered or died which…wasn’t fun, you know, your older brother is kind of a bitch to deal with”

            There was immense hurry, with the emperor ready to destroy the world the Foremost couldn’t wait one more second to go talk to him and persuade him not to retaliate for the recent attacks; he had to be in his top form. And yet he still stopped to stare in awe at Maurice for a few seconds.

            “You dealt with Tzar?” he said, in a mere whisper.

            “Uh…yes” he didn’t seem proud, if anything he seemed to regret it, as if that conversation had taken something from him and he wasn’t wholly sure it had been worth it “as I said…somebody had to”

            The man put one hand on his employer’s shoulder.

            “Thank you Maurice, I, in the name of the emp…of the whole world, am thankful to you”

            “Yeah well…” the guy, big as he was, seemed to be trying to shrink “you’re welcome I guess”

            “You are free to rest, I can take it from here, whatever you need ask the workers here and say you have my absolute license and one more time thank you”

            “Ok, uh, good luck talking to the Tzar”

            The big guy walked off, occasionally shooting a look toward his boss whom, once he was left alone, kept going on his way until he finally came to the doors of the throne room. He took a deep breath and entered.

            Maurice hadn’t been exaggerating; the air in the throne was so thick with heat and ozone that was almost impossible to breathe. The Darkness extended beyond the silhouette of the throne, now encompassing the entire room, and in the center of it, two cold stars shone blue. The Foremost entered and closed the door behind him, surrendering himself to the dark.

            He was floating on the void, a world of umbra where only the constellation of two suns provided any frame of reference. And the suns hungered with anger.

            **“YOU. HAD. MERCY.”**

“Brother…I punished leader of rebellion, I did as asked”

            **“KARACHAY. IS. DEAD; YOU. WERE. ATTACKED; WE’RE. OWED. BLOOD.”**

“Blood has already been paid! Hector is…” the man choked for a few seconds “Hector is dead, the rebellion is no more”

            **“IS. NOT. ENOUGH!”**

The whole palace shook from its foundations to its cusp, cracks on every wall widening just a bit more. The shadows intensified, if such a thing was possible, it no longer felt like they were merely surrounding him, but as if they were starting to seep into his own substance, he suspected that the only reason they hadn’t consumed him yet where because of his own power.

            “It will never be enough, brother, you destroyed half the world and conquered the other half after what happened to mother…what more is left to do now that brother is dead? What more horrors can we inflict on world that we haven’t already for thirty and five years?”

            **“WORLD. MUST. PAY.”**

“And what happens once there is not more world? What happens then? We die, that is what happens”

            Silence, absolute sensory depravation stretched for minutes, the void thought long and hard.

            **“KILL. FAMILY. THEN; YOU. DO. THAT; THAT. IS. ENOUGH:”**

“No”

Suddenly, the darkness became a lot more constricting.

            **“I’M. ORDERING. YOU.”**

“I will not do it” he was surrounded by oblivion, and yet he stood his ground. He was facing the insurmountable beast that put a crack in the world and yet he stood his ground. He challenged the mirthful emperor, and yet he stood his ground.

            **“I. AM. EMPEROR!”**

“And I am the Foremost Citizen, and I will for once do my job and stand for the people of the empire so that it can prosper and grow”

            **“YOU. ARE. FIRED; YOU. ARE. NOTHING”**

A hurricane of hot air made the concrete walls reverberate and the Foremost somehow knew that Tzar had stood up. Quaking was unleashed, making the ground flow like a wild sea and the Foremost knew that Tzar was approaching. Seething air burned the skin on his face and cracked his shades further, the Foremost knew that Tzar was talking directly in front of him.

            **“YOU. CAN’T. WIN.”**

And the Foremost, still, stood his ground.

            “And what are you going to do?”

            **“YOU’LL. BE. DESTROYED.”**

“You can not do that, I have power as well, I stood there beside you when you won the war and I was untouched, I can not be harmed by you”

            **“I. NEEDN’T. POWER.”**

Continents that could only be perceived by their gravitational pull moved around and the Foremost knew that the emperor’s hands were closing around him, like waves crashing on a boat in the middle of the night.

            “Will you kill me, Tzar? Will you kill one of Lilith’s sons?”

            The pressure stopped, and this felt wrong once again, for just as it is incorrect when something massive starts moving by its own volition, it is even more incorrect that, once it started, it stops by it self as well.

            “You can not do it, I am our mother’s child, it would be beyond blasphemous, even for you”

            The shadows slowly retreated throughout the room, they condensed and compressed back into the throne. The walls all around seemed diminished, as if once supported by the darkness now they were frail and eroded, unable to sustain themselves. And the Former Foremost felt very much like those walls.

            **“LEAVE. FAR. AWAY; DON’T. EVER. RETURN.”**

“Yes, brother”

            The man left the room, knowing he had done as much as he could here and no more would be accomplished. He was no longer the Foremost, he was now only himself.

            Once he abandoned the throne room another man entered, a man with a sardonic smile, who had heard everything that happened, it hadn’t been hard when the emperor was one of the people talking. The man walked up to the throne and asked.

            “What shall we do now emperor?”

            **“JUST. KILL. HIM; DON’T. TELL. ME; WETHER. YOU. SUCCEED; OR. YOU. FAIL; BUT. DO. IT.”**

“Very well, emperor” said the new Foremost Citizen.

           

* * *

 

            The man with the cracked glasses was walking through the corridors as fast as he could without running, he knew it was dumb and pointless to try and keep his dignity but he refused to leave that place for the last time scurrying like a rat abandoning a sinking ship. His steps were muffled by the moth-munched carpets, and his figure was hidden by the jagged shadows, and yet he couldn’t help but feel observed, knowing that he was in a place he not only no longer belonged to, but that was actively hostile to him. He wasn’t stupid, he was perfectly aware that just because Tzar couldn’t kill him with his own hands that didn’t mean he was safe in the capital. As soon as he left the city he would feel safe, but before that, he was familiar with how pointless it was to try and escape the Rectifiers or the Inquisitors’ reach. He wasn’t the normal scared citizen, he had powers, but the imperial forces had been trained with ways to handle that, mainly with Karachay in mind, but those protocols still applied to him.

            He crossed the dusty, debris-filled halls until he reached the exit, which was barred by a small team of rectifiers, all aiming at him with rifles. The man stopped and the Foremost citizen walked slowly into the room from behind him.

            “Well, look at this…isn’t this hilarious? You know, I don’t know why but I always dreamed I would be in this situation with you” said the man with the big shoulder pads who, until a few minutes ago, had been the leader of the Rectifiers.

            “You always looked so confident and tall with your glasses and your bond with the emperor, yet you never quite knew how to properly keep a population under control, always some rebellion going on, always someone breaking the law right in front of you and you did nothing and then when the situation got out of control we had to step in and put down the fires you let grow and it was just so…infuriating, you know? By mirth, you were supposed to be an oppressor; you should have done your fucking job!”

            “You think you can stop me with bullets? You think you would survive the attempt?” answered the man with the broken shades, who hadn’t even bothered to raise his hands.

            “Of course not, protocols and all that, by the way, how does that bruise in you head feels?” the man in the new uniform was slowly walking around the former Foremost.

            “It is throbbing”

            “Well, you’re welcome, now, unless you want me to shoot at you right here right now, making you unleash your full power, obliterating mirth knows what percentage is left of the planet’s surface, you are going to take off your glasses, without your hands, I don’t want to see no fingers anywhere near your temples, and you are going to look at the ground”

            “And then what?”

            “Then a bottle of chloroform up your nose and then suffocation, maybe with my own hands, I don’t know yet, now if you want to protest, remember the alternative is the end of the world, and we all know you became a big softie who don’t want none of that, right?”

            “I would not call own position ‘softie’, but yes, I much rather world to stay alive, I would say this position takes certain amount of strength, knowing how difficult it is to achieve”

            “Touching, now do as fucking told”

            The man looked at the ground; fists tightly pressed by his sides and shook his head to the sides. The glasses slid off his face and feel into the ground, breaking completely this time. The Foremost citizen stepped into what was left of the frames, standing right in front of the prisoner.

            “Alright, now look at here”

            The man raised his face to look at the officer and the officer looked at those eyes, the strange, slightly shining eyes, made of an indescribable color with even more indescribable scenes etched into the pupils. For a second the man with the shoulder pads saw a frail woman, lying on the dirty ground of some forgotten back alley, with extremities as thin as twigs, greasy hair covering most of her jagged face. She was accompanied by a swollen boy with bright blue eyes and a murderous expression, directed at her. The woman was as weak as her son was strong and she was about to die and as soon as she died the world would be doomed to the whims of that boy. But before that happened she managed to say the next words: “take care of them, you deserve everything, take it and make it yours and make this disgusting rotten world suffer for everything it did to me, my son, my Tzar, my beautiful king”. Then the woman died and that was the end of the world.

            The vision was so intense that the officer was tempted to take a step back; instead he kept his composure and tried to raise a trembling hand, holding a bottle filled with drug. The flask got close to the prisoner’s face and he, who was still holding his gaze, simply blew hot air through his nose. Air hot enough to make the glass break and the chemical spill.

            “Let me tell you secret” said the man as the weapons held by the Rectifiers melted on their hands, along with their bodies. “the goggles, they do nothing” a light was starting to shine, not as intense as the one that came from the wound on his back, this time it was a much more measured one, a controlled one. Indescribable atrocities were occurring around him but restrained ones. “Nothing but frame the world in front of me, to give me aim, to give me focus, Tzar never had one, Karachay choose his fingers, I choose this, and this is what happens when it is taken away”

            The Foremost citizen had no longer skin, bones or organs, everything but his brain, his eyes and his ears had melted away, and it was still alive all the same and somehow, even though it had no lungs, no larynx and certainly no mouth, it was still screaming, the brain was screaming. The man known as Noble Jerry raised his boot and stepped on it, killing it for good.

            The light faded away, a big circular portion was missing from the floor below him and the roof above. The man started to walk to the exit.

            “WAIT!” said a voice behind him. He turned and saw a big guy, cowering scared, hidden behind a column right beyond the edge of the recently formed circle.

            “Maurice” said the man.

            “I…I just wanted to let you know, before you leave, uh…she’s here, Harmonica is inside the capital, she has been seen entering the library, there is a group of rectifiers surrounding the place waiting for her to leave the building”

            “Thank you for information, are you coming with me?”

            “I…I mean…I…” the guy looked at the scorched circle, with the horrors of what had just happened inside it a few seconds ago still fresh in his mind.

            “I understand, Maurice” said the man, nodding “empire needs new Foremost Citizen after all”

            The man turned around and left the palace.

 

 

 

 


	16. intermission

            The girl was reading alone in her room. The place was barren in a very specific way. There is such a thing as a “Spartan style” which is basically exclusively functional, minimalist and not particularly aesthetically pleasing. This room was not it. There was elegance, and artistry, and comfort. Walls with a slightly pink shade to them, a soft, cushy bed with stuffed animals lying on top of the warm covers, a desk with a big mirror and pictures and perhaps some make up. And of course the prettiest thing in the room, a teenage girl. The design was harmonious and beautiful and it all looked dead. Staged was another word to describe it. Perhaps it was the lack of posters or pictures on the walls. Maybe there was not enough clutter in the floor, not enough dirty clothes and bags and magazines and what have you. It could be that there were no papers or notebooks or anything with handwriting anywhere to be seen. But probably the biggest sign of something amiss was just the general sense of unnatural order, not the order caused by someone putting things in their place but the order caused by the fact that no one ever put them out of place to begin with. There was no real sign that a young woman, or indeed any kind of person, had ever inhabited that place. And yet there she was, sitting in her desk, reading a book which contents were probably about history, the history of how the world was before and shortly after she was born. A world that no longer existed.

            But surely she had to take out the covers off her bed so she could sleep beneath them…unless she only ever lay on the top of the covers to sleep. But then again, she had to take the clothes off her cupboard to change…unless she never changed them. But one more time, she had to grab things in the room when she needed them and then if she put them back into place they would be slightly askew, a little more worn down, certainly some change had to be enacted in this room if she truly used it as a living space…unless.

            But now here comes proper human chaos, in the form of a small infant girl, with round, rosy, plucky cheeks, folded by the sweetest smile you’ll ever see. The girl comes in stumbling, for her fat legs are still not fully used to support her own weight, and so her arms are extended, since the half stumble-half walk will turn into an inevitable fall towards the ground as soon as she stops. So the baby hopes someone will grab her before that happens, and so she extends her arms waiting for the loving embrace of her older sister. The embrace never comes so the girl falls, but luckily she fell close to the desk and grabed on to one of its legs.

            “You wanna play?” says the girl to the adolescent.

            The older sister turns her eyes away from the pages she was reading and twists her head to view her sibling. The bent of her neck is ever so askew; her eyes tired, beaten, they looked like they spent the entire night opened, every night.

            “I am reading” she says, without anger, without accent or emphasis, they are just words “please, leave me alone”

            “I’m bored!” insist the young girl.

            The older girl looks at her. She just stated in very clear terms that she is doing something and asked to be left alone and yet this was all dismissed by the child, the girl considered the interests and wishes of her older sister as irrelevant, due measures will have to be put in place.

            “If you leave me alone I will give you something that you want”

            “I wanna play with you!”

            So positive reinforcement didn’t work out.

            “If you don’t leave me alone I will hurt you”

            “And I will tell mom!”

            Negative reinforcement couldn’t be applied either.

            “Ok, let’s go and play” she conceded.

            So the teenager took the small child to play hide and seek to a small forest nearby and they played for a few hours until she was sure enough that the child was lost and then she just walked out and left her sister there.  The girl wasn’t found until a day later and by then early sings of hypothermia had settled in. She survived, but barely. The older sister, of course, was never blamed for this. At first the small girl was too weak and incoherent to properly explain what happened and once she felt better her parents were too angry with her to properly listen.

            That was the first time that Geometrica tried to kill Harmonica.

            There where others but by the law of diminishing returns, the repetition made their parents more watchful and controlling of the girl’s actions and so every attempt was more easily frustrated.

            A couple of years later the same scene repeated itself. Geometrica was writing something on a sketchbook, a fairly new thing for her that until then she had been content with reading. Perhaps she considered she had absorbed enough and it was time to regurgitate what she had taken in. She was doing this, sitting on a fallen tree, in the ample backyard of their mansion, possibly one of the last ten mansions still inhabited and used as such in the world in the last ten years. She had thoughts on that, and many more things and she was putting those thoughts into words, one could maybe even say ‘angry’ words.

            An adolescent girl in a blue dress that rumpled in silly plump folded frills and laces walked up to her and said.

            “I’m bored!”

            “Good, because I have a new game in mind” said Geometrica, raising her immutable face from her notebook. “There is a tree with a funny lump on its side, let’s throw rocks at it, the first one to hit it wins”

            The woman was standing up, a pack or rocks ready on her pockets when the girl said.

            “Nah, it’s probably a wasp’s nest and they’ll end up stinging me, or the rocks will bounce off the tree and hit me on the head, let’s play another game”

            Geometrica stopped on her tracks and looked at her sister, blinking once.

            Trickery was also not going to work now.

            “Ok, I have another game we can play”

            So the teenager took the girl to the forest again and showed her an anthill, bursting with life and activity.

            “I want you to go get some bleach and pour it on the ants, don’t worry, they can’t sting you, see? One is walking on my arm and nothing’s happening! But I want to see how it looks when you pour bleach on them”

            “But that’s going to kill them”

            “Don’t worry they don’t feel pain, they’re not like us”

            And Harmonica went to seek for bleach and poured it on the hill and indeed the spectacle was remarkable. The pandemonium formed by the insects that were practically boiling out of the ground was incredibly entertaining. Next they started catching fish and leaving them on the shore to see how they contorted trying to get back on the water, and then they’d get frogs to sting them with sticks, and rats to crush with rocks and cats to cut with knives. Every step of the way Geometrica reminded her sister of a simple core fact, they don’t feel pain, they are not like us. After they had their fun, Geometrica would always make sure to leave all their work on clear display, sometimes she would even encourage Hamonica to do the same thing, to take initiative, to go at it by herself, to get creative. After a month of this she went and told her mom of all the things Harmonica was doing and how she didn’t know why she did them and how she was scared for her little sister.

            This too worked for a while but not for long. There weren’t proper mental institutions left in the world and Harmonica was royalty anyway, this was a demographic that was comfortable housing its fair share of psychopaths in its ranks. Harmonica was put under a tighter surveillance and stricter isolation, this time not so she wouldn’t hurt herself but so she wouldn’t hurt others. But again, not for long.

            A few years later the scene repeated itself one more time.

            Geometrica was pacing on a deserted street a few blocks away from her manor, she wasn’t fuming. Neither her breath nor her pulse was accelerated. She just walked from one side of the street to the other, her eyes firm and focused on nothing, her glare flowing with the movements of her head without stopping anywhere.

            She was thinking back on a conversation she had with her father a few hours previous to that, a conversation that had degenerated into a discussion and then into an argument, only to end as a long stream of insults coming from her progenitor, with a few threats of violence sprinkled here and there. They had apparently disagreed on what were the most convenient actions to take regarding the current state of the Kingdom in relation to the empire. And now she was replaying the exchange in her head, trying to pick apart where her arguments had failed to persuade the king and what could have been done better. But most of all she was just remembering the insults, with a focus on how she could have replied had those threats of violence not been there as well.

            A woman in her twenties, skinny and pale, with a shaved head and dark spots on her eyes, came from behind a corner.

            “I’m bored!”

            Geometrica stopped pacing.

            “Ok, come with me, I have another game we can play”

            “Let me guess, it’s some poor animal that you have tied up so I can flail or decapitate or something? Because I already did that today”

            “You did?”

            “Yeah, sure, I was careful to do it far away enough that the folks wouldn’t hear the whines, killed a few hours and a few dogs too, but I’m bored now”

            Geometrica looked at the ground. Had her eyebrows been frowning someone would have think that she was angry or defeated, but her facial muscles sit there, almost as unused as her bedroom.

            Corruption was also discarded.

            “Ok, I have one more game we can play”

            “Yay! A new game!” cheered Harmonica “what is it this time, sis?”

            “It’s a verbal game, very simple” she walked until she stood face to face with her sibling who had an eager smile on her face “I’ll talk and you will listen, understood?”

            “Easy enough”

            “Yes, easy, ok, ready? Here I go”

            Geometrica took a deep breath.

            “I hate you, I despise you, I wish you were dead, I wish you had died at birth, I always did and the fact that you thought I liked you or even tolerated you at all makes me convinced you are not intelligent at all, you are so stupid, you always did everything I told you and never realized I wanted you to hurt, to suffer, so you would leave me alone” at no point the tone of voice was raised, at no point emphasis showed any kind of real emotion behind those words, just like everything she had always said, they came as nothing but words out of her mouth. “But you never did, you always came back because you are a pathetic, terrible, sad, lonely horrible person, you are awful, you have done horrible things and for what? For nothing because you are horrible, no one loves you, no one ever did, mom and dad think you are disgusting, Telescopica doesn’t even care, and they are right and you deserve only to suffer and die”

            By this point the smile had dripped away from Harmonica’s face and once Geometrica was done she was quiet and somber.

            “Very well” Harmonica said “now it’s my turn, see, I think you are the stupid one if you think I didn’t realize what was going on, In fact you are downright retarded, you are the dumbest piece of shit to ever exist if you think I never caught on how fucking fucked up you are, just how much of a deranged fucking psychopath, just, man, how much of a truly despicable, debased regurgitated pile of half digested cum your heart is, like, holy shit, I’m getting shivers, I’m getting fucking goosebumps thinking of all the vomit inducing shit you made me do, you are the violated, bleeding, pulsating anus of some twice raped, thrice retarded whore, you are that weird sticky green ooze that comes out of a maggot when you crush it with your shoe, you are the moral equivalent of a skidmark on a toilet, something that should have been cleansed out of this earth long ago, you are filthy, ugly, foul and loush, which is a real word, by the way, to conclude, you, my dear sister, are a bitch”

            Harmonica stopped to take a deep breath of air.

            “And that is why I love you so much!” she concluded with a smile and a hug.

            Geometrica processed all of this as she was embraced and when she was finally released she simply said.

            “Why then? If you knew what was actually going on, why did you play along?”

            “Because it was a game! Duh!”

            “Ok” she said stopping for a second and then continuing “it was a game, fine, but still, why?”

            “Well…because…you where the only one who actually paid attention to me, I mean, Telescopica was always busy training or some shit, like, speaking of fucked up individuals, she has an eerie way to ignore anything that doesn’t immediately concern her, mother was too coddling, dad, well, I’m pretty sure dad would have beaten the shit out of me if I ever bothered him with anything, but you…you actually spend time with me, doing horrible shit to drive me away, sure, but you still put in the effort, and guess what? That fucked up shit? It was fun! It was interesting, I was doing new things! I spent an entire night in the woods by myself!” she wasn’t saying this in a recriminatory tone, if anything it sounded like she was bragging “so yeah, you are a fucked up monster but so fucking what? That is how shit works, right? I mean compared to the really fucked up shit out there, the emperor, the empire, the crack and all, who cares? The world is fucking ending! Lets do all the things that ‘we can’t do’ because they are not going to make any fucking difference in the end”

            “I see” replied Geometrica.

Her expression remained the same.

Rejection hadn’t work, nothing was going to work.

She processed this information and accepted it.

“Ok then”

            “Ok, your turn now! Hit me with all you got, for real now, because that whole ‘no one loves you’ deal was some serious weaksauce”

            “Ok”

* * *

 

            The mansion was more somber than usual, with a prideful king, sullen and furious, a grieving mother, devastated and heartbroken, and her stupid sister who had responded to the news as she did with anything, by just locking herself in the training rooms and spending hours upon endless hours running, punching things, lifting things and above all else, shooting things. To Harmonica they were nothing but a bunch of pussies. The news was that the princess of the kingdom of the dawning moon had been captured and killed by the forces of the empire.

            Complete bullshit, clearly. Geometrica was not so stupid as to let herself be captured by a bunch of overpowered morons, but then Harmonica would be the only one to know this since she was the only one who had ever bothered to actually know the bitch. She had just fucked off to the empire by herself and whatever she was doing there it was bound to be something weird and fucked up, and all according to her plan. And mirth knew that she needed some of that here, ever since her older sister had left, weird and fucked up had been sorely missed on the mansion.

            Harmonica had affected a sort of rehabilitation in the recent times; it was no good to have all the eyes on her every movement. For years now she had kept her games well hidden to herself. She had long ago moved from hapless animals to actual human beings, and there was a perfect secret spot, well hidden in the depths of the woods she had once been lost in, to carry out all her fantasies. Sometimes, after coming back from a particularly gruesome day where she had gotten a bit carried away even by her standards, she stopped to consider if she would have been like this had Geometrica not properly fucked her in the brain all those years ago. Would have she been a nice, normal person without the malicious influence of her sister? She doubted it. Her father was a bit of a megalomaniac with a big inferiority complex and anger issues after his kingdom had been raped by the empire, Geometrica was an abhorrent creature, Telescopica was also pretty fucked up in her own way, the odds, both nature and nurture wise, were not on her favor. But, she concluded as she washed away the blood from her hands and face before entering the mansion at late hours of the night, she didn’t much care either way. She did what she liked and it wasn’t like the world was all that much worse for it. In a few years from now they would all be in the same body pile and if some people got there earlier because of her it made no real difference.

            She was immersed in these thoughts as she made her way towards her room after a night of escapades when an old voice came fluttering towards her from a nearby room.

            “Sweetie…? Is that you?”

            Harmonica walked to the room wherein an old woman, resting on an old leather couch, with her body resting limply on top of it as if all energies had been drained away, was looking at her. The room was dark and only illuminated by the slit of light that came from the hall, a light that was not shining on the lady inside.

            “Hi mom” said Harmonica “how’s it hanging?”

            “Oh, it’s you, for a second I thought you were…”

            “Nope, is just me, which is…I mean, I don’t even look like her, all we have in common is the color of our hair”

            “Yes…I know honey…would you mind…? Could you come here with me? I feel like I need someone to hold me tonight”

            “Sure, mom”

            She walked inside and folded her arms around the lady on the couch, who embraced her in turn. At first they were quiet but soon she felt the shakes and shivers of contained tears welling up. Her mother was crying.

            “There, there” she said, patting her mother on the back.

            “I just…I miss her so much…she was the best of my children, she could be distant sometimes but she wasn’t like Telescopica or you, she was so good”

            “I know mom, I miss her too” if any of this stung, she didn’t show it.

            “But at least you are here with me, no matter what you did in your childhood, or what problems you may have caused, now all we have is each other, and we have to stay together”

            “Sure, sure” tears were starting to run down her face, not because she was shedding them but because her mother was spilling them all over her.

            “I don’t know what I would do if any more of you left me, it would destroy me, it would be the end of me…I just…please, tell me you’ll always be here with me, I need to hear it…”

            “I’ll always be here with you, mom, don’t worry” she wanted so bad to just punch the woman in the face and leave forever, if not to be free then simply because she was now aware of the extent of the damage that would make.

            It was tantalizing, like looking at a house of cards and wishing to blow on it, or looking someone near a pool and wanting to push them into it, or driving down the road and looking at a truck coming towards you on the other lane, the temptation, the constant permanent suggestion of doing something just for the impact it would cause, every intrusive thought she had ever had in her life she had indulged, and this here now, with her mother showing quite how vulnerable she was, it was hard to resist the temptation to pounce on it right there and then.

            But the years had taught her to be smart about it, if there was a real possibility that things would end badly for her, either due to permanent restraining or death, then she would resist. She understood consequences, it was precisely because of that understanding that the temptation could be so sharp, but she had willpower as well. In a way, her own squirms were another form of delight. Once she started asking how it would feel if she resisted her urges, how it would sting her to cockblock herself, what it would do to her mind and how far she could go before she snapped (and of course, how fucked up things would get once that happened) then she could just sit and do nothing. She could stay here with her mother and hug her tightly as she cried. Hell, she could cry too while she was at it, why not? Yes, she would pretend she was a normal, lovable person.

            Until she couldn’t pretend any longer.

            She really missed her sister.

 

* * *

 

            “You probably know why I am making visit, citizen Ginna”

            “Why?” asked Geometrica.

            “It is because your fourth assigned mate has died, again” Said the Foremost.

            He was standing, as he usually did, on the entrance of some ruined apartment, wherein one of the citizens of the empire lived.

This particular citizen had proved to be rather problematic. From the first moment she showed up on the capitol and walked into the palace of the emperor asking for citizenship he couldn’t get a read on her. He wasn’t prone to show emotion, he was a stoic, reserved individual, but this was largely posturing. He was just not an expressive person, and what little expressions he had, he kept under control for the sake of discipline and to show an image of commanding authority. She, on the other hand, didn’t only show any emotion, she didn’t seem to have any, her gaze was always forwards, her tired eyes never turning or focusing on anything. She talked and listened.

            And yet. There were four people, all whom died under mysterious circumstances, all shortly after being assigned to live with her. He was familiar with murderers and vicious monsters, his brothers were such, and many of colleagues as well. She wasn’t like any of them and so he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

            “You are aware that unmarried citizens are due to form part of government program of integration of outliers”

            “No need, I am willing to accept any new partner you assign to me”

            That was a bit of a loophole, since as long as she willingly accepted to follow government directives she wasn’t really fit for the P.I.O. and there wasn’t anything in the directives that covered sudden and repetitive death of partners. Obviously she was the killer, but to follow proper protocol first he had to demonstrate it, which was extra job that he didn’t feel like doing, but he didn’t want to do things against directive either. Many of those directives had been established by him so that the shapeless coalition the emperor had formed could function like a coherent state at all, which had involved raising a number of citizens into positions of ‘power’ as politicians. He was proud of it and liked to follow it to the letter as often as he could.

“Very well, I will tell you what is going to happen now” said the Foremost, with a sigh “the only members of state allowed to live by themselves are the workers of the state, so I will assign you position in government and you will fulfill position under penalty of death, understood?”

            “I want to be a librarian”

            “Excuse me?”

            “I wish for my position to be a librarian”

            “We do not have libraries on capital”

            “I know, I have books, I can make one”

            He thought about it for a few seconds, enough to realize that to spend any more time thinking about it was a waste of time when he could just let things sort themselves out.

            “Very well, you will present tomorrow at dawn into imperial palace to be assigned official position as imperial librarian, ahoj!”

            “Foremost citizen!” She said, before he could leave “is there any news of the people I told you about?”

            He turned.

            “No, there is no news of anyone going by the names you gave me”

            “Remember, from both of them Telescopica is the more dangerous one, you can ignore Harmonica but you can’t let Telescopica live if you come across her, lest you wish for the empire to be destroyed”

            “I will keep that in mind, thank you citizen”

            The Foremost walked away and, not sure why, he felt a shiver go down his spine. He wouldn’t admit it, but that woman disturbed him. She didn’t look like someone who was scared of neither things nor people, which made him curious as to why she was so concerned about this so called Telescopica.

            He would have to investigate about that.

* * *

 

            Her plan had worked. Almost.

            After so many years, years of reading and writing and discussing and planning, the empire was finally about to be toppled, and the rest of the world with it. She was still unable to understand how her father had allowed this to happen. After the war his kingdom had been the last one standing, he could have made one last stand against the emperor. Sure the earth would have been obliterated but wasn’t oblivion so much preferable to this constant and permanent indignity that was the current world? This mockery of a planet which was doomed anyway?

            She tried arguing this with her father and this had been a mistake because she not only got his incredibly rude rejection, but she also showed her hand, which made him decree that he would never give the crown to her, instead deciding that once he was dead, all authority would go to the brainwashed puppet that was Telescopica. So, she had to reevaluate things and decided to tackle the problem from a different angle.

            It wasn’t only opposing kingdoms what had toppled tyrants in the past. There were revolutions, rebellions, resistances. And she could form one if she so desired, she was smart and most of all, she knew how to manipulate people. She wouldn’t be the leader, that position required someone with actual human charisma, which she lacked. But she knew a poor man, with a lot of anger and also a lot of intelligence, called Hector, who would suit perfectly for this.

            The plan was basically to cut the heads of the Cerberus, the bandit, the foremost and the emperor. She and her group would handle the first, Hector and his cell would take care of the second, and if everything went right they would take on together the last one, under the pretense that she knew a way to neutralize the emperor’s mirth, which she didn’t. This was going to be a suicide mission.

            As far as she could see the Foremost had been incapacitated and who knew when he was going to get up again, the bandit had been outright eradicated and she was still waiting on the report from her cell on that, which had been making itself wait. She worried, as far as she could worry about anything, that the worst had happened and that her entire rebellion had been spent in just killing the first two objectives, in which case she would have to do something she had prepared for but that she hoped wouldn’t have to happen. She would have to go back to plan A.

            She held these thoughts in the darkness of her library, a solitary place, built inside an abandoned church. All the colored windows had been shattered long ago, the relics and statues plundered. The pews, the candelabra, and all the other decorations were long gone. All there was left were a few tables wherein piles of books had been accumulated in the last few years she had lived there. No one ever came and that was the way she liked it.

            She sat at a table, illuminated by the full moon from outside, reading an old book. It was quiet.

            Screams started to come from outside, she didn’t raise her gaze from the pages. The screams got louder and then they ceased all together.

            Silence reigned for a few seconds.

            Then the two giant wooden doors were slammed, waking deafening echoes all through the stone walls. There, with tattered clothes and blood dripping from every inch of her body, as well as from the half melted machete she was holding on her hand, was her youngest sister, smiling manically.

            “I’M BORED!” she yelled “AHAHAHAHAH GET IT? I’m fucking bored! That how it always starts! That is what I always say and then you propose some ridiculous shit for me to do and I go and do it and then everything goes horribly wrong and everyone suffers and we all get a good laugh, like this: AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

            The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the book, yet she was no longer reading, she was thinking. The doors closed behind Harmonica.

            “Hey! Earth to Geometrica! I’m here! I made it! I found you! I fucking won! I won! Oh my shit, I fucking did it!” he girl was making her way towards her sister, with all sorts of wavering and flourishes to her body language, she was projecting and chewing scenery for an audience of one “you…you will not believe the shit I had to do to get here!”

            She stopped, her shoulder slumped for a second, her breath became much more altered, as if the exhaustion of all the past months was finally catching up to her.

            “I…I killed so many people! Like so many! I killed a whole town! Fuck! I killed father! Can you believe it? I killed father, like, that is how it started really…I just…I snapped one day, you know? And it was over the dumbest shit too, I was wanting to kill the dude for years and I would always say ‘no, just wait until you snap, wait to see how much you can truly hate the guy, like truly loathe him just to see what you come up with then’ and you know what? It wasn’t even worth it! I don’t even remember what happened, he asked me to do something, he called me to his room or some shit and he was kind of an ass about it, like he always was, and for whatever reason that was the one time too many! So I just put a knife through his eye! Just like that! And then he dies and I realize what happened and realize I’m in like, deep shit right? So I’m like, I better run away! But where? Well, where else but with my dear sis!”

            Geometrica had put the book down but she was still not looking at Harmonica, her tired gaze was lost in front of her.

            “Because I fucken’ knew the truth, what? You think faking your death is going to convince me of shit? So I’m like, sure, I should run away and meet her, and here I am and I have so much to tell you, I killed the bandit Geometrica! I killed the fucking bandit!”

            Now the woman looked at the girl, her eyes fully focused on her.

            “You should have seen it! It was…oh man, I don’t even have the words for it, it was beautiful, is just too bad the guy was a fag because I wouldn’t have mind riding that dong, but no, huge cock gobbler, you wouldn’t believe the things I saw with that fucker, so anyway the rebellion finds him right? Which, by the way, I knew you’d be in league with, after all the stupid arguments you had with father those years ago, shit, this had to be a part of some plan of yours, so these guys, they want to capture the guy and when he is about to kill them all BAM I jump on him and completely neuter the fucker, because you see, I’m apparently immune to his powers because of fetuses or some shit, I don’t know, and I neuter him and save all those assholes so they can capture the guy, I mean, it didn’t do no good because they all died all the same but…”

            Geometrica stood up from the chair. The suddenness of the action and the jarring noise of wood dragging against stone interrupted the monologue.

            “They are dead?” she asked, in her monotone voice.

            “Yeah, and I don’t mean just dead but like, twisted, like FUCKED UP, those powers…let me tell you they do some trippy shit, I’m talking about stuff that was weird even for me, like, holy shit”

            “I see…”

            She finally turned and saw Harmonica for the first time in years.

            “So you did it, you found me, just like I knew you would, and now we have one more game to play, the last one…are you ready?”

            “Yeah…” Harmonica answered between agitated breaths, still a little hyperventilated “sure, I’m up for whatever”

            “Ok, then, since you are telling me that the powers of the bandit didn’t hurt you…and since you already killed the bandit, then the game I want to propose you is that you go to the palace…and kill the emperor yourself, can you do this for me?”

            “HA! I’m not going to do that!”

            The woman looked at her, with her tired eyes, not moving a single muscle in her face.

            “I mean, I probably could but, have you seen how it was when the bandit died? And he was just a little piece of shit; the emperor is the fucker who cracked the world, remember? If I went up to him and killed him who fucking knows what might happen, for all I know the whole world might end!”

            “Yes, exactly” she wasn’t putting any emphasis on her words to come across as more persuasive, she was just talking “the whole world would end at last, think of it, think of all the damage that could be done, think of the consequences, think of how big this is, how many lives would be destroyed in one single instant, isn’t it tempting? Isn’t it delectable?”

            The young woman contorted her face, as if she was tasting a particularly acid lemon. It was tempting, it was incredibly tempting, just as it was tempting to kill her sister right in front of her, simply because of how fucked up it would be, just as it had been tempting to bite off her own fingers when she heard that humans where instinctually incapable of doing it, just to see if she could, it was tempting like dropping a baby simply to see the face of the mother, or to start masturbating in the middle of church, or to do anything once you were told not to do it, just to see what would happen.

            “See” Harmonica said “the thing is I get it, I totally do, hell, I respect it, I applaud it even…but what is the hurry? If I do that now then the party ends and that is it, and I loose the chance of doing so many other things I could do! The world is going to end anyway, we can enjoy our last years in it…together” She put a hand on her older sister’s shoulder “waddaya say?” she made a most gleeful and innocent smile, no longer deranged, no longer maniac. Just a happy smile because she was happy to see her sister.

            Geometrica opened her eyes, truly opened them, for the first time. The white were fully surrounding her irises, her pupils were completely contracted to the point they could barely be seen. She no longer looked tired.

            She yanked the machete from her sister’s hand and started pacing around the room, mechanically. She would give ten steps, stop, turn, then make ten more steps, and all the while her nostrils would get louder and louder. Finally she stopped next to the table and said.

            “No”

            “No what?”

            “No”

            She put her left arm on top of the table.

            “No”

            She raised the machete.

            “No!”

            She brought down her machete, on her arm. Blood sputtered everywhere.

            “NO!”

            She hacked again.

            “NO!”

            And again.

            “NO!”

            The blade was too blunt so bones started cracking.

            “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” every ‘no’ was punctuated by another hack of the machete.

            “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”

            Her arm was finally separated from the rest of her body, she threw the machete away.

            “Sis, are you ok?” asked Harmonica.

            The older woman grabbed her arm and swung it by her side; she walked up to her sister and hit her in the head with it.

            “NO!”

            And then she hit again, her sister was on the ground now, trying to shield herself.

            “NO! NO! NO!”

            She kept hitting and hitting, whooping, unleashing punch after punch using her own ripped arm as a club.

            “WHY DO YOU HAVE TO FUCK EVERYTHING UP!? WHY CANT YOU JUST DO AS YOU ARE TOLD!?!?! WHY YOU HAVE TO BE SO STUPID!!?!?!?”

            Harmonica was in no position to answer; she just lay on the ground, taking the beating, no longer even attempting to defend herself.

            “I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!!”

            She stopped for a second, Harmonica could be unconscious, she could be dead.

            “I…!!!!”

            She kneeled on top of the body.

            “HATE…!!!!!”

            She grabbed the girl’s mouth and forced it open.

            “YOU…!!!!!!!”

            She stuffed the arm on her sister’s mouth, starting by the severed end. She pressed and pushed until she made sure the thing was well encrusted into the cavity and the she screamed. She hollered at the ceiling and the walls for a good minute.

            The body next to her didn’t move.

            Very well. That was that.

            She took a deep breath and composed herself. It was time for plan A.

            Geometrica walked up to the doors without even sparing a single glance to Harmonica. She opened the doors and left the place.

            Harmonica lay there, on the ground, with her sister’s arm stuffed in her mouth.

            Alone.


	17. Chapter 17

            So she had killed Karachay. She had done that and managed to walk out from it mostly untarnished. The man people knew as Jerry noble was starting to understand why this woman was such a big deal. To the point that none of the rectifiers dared enter the library she had just walked in. He didn’t blame them; he didn’t feel like entering either. What he did, as soon as he arrived in the imperial vehicle he stole, was take advantage of the fact that no one here knew yet about him being fired, and commanded the forces to form a perimeter.

            The night was cold enough to blow fog out of his mouth which made the people around him antsy believing that it was something else beyond mere condensation. He paid no mind to this, for him it was almost nostalgic. He remembered his first days in charge as an eleven year old kid, walking around, ordering people to do this and that. Because he was the brother of the monstrous emperor people gave him a wide berth back then. It wasn’t until after years where he showed his restrained, almost indolent, nature that the citizens and his employees got used to him.

            But perhaps it wasn’t only the fog what made the rectifiers uncomfortable near him, perhaps it was that since he no longer had his shades with him, anyone could gaze into his eyes, and that could be a shocking experience. Or perhaps it was simply that an aura remained in him after using his power in a way he hadn’t done in decades, an aura which they subconsciously knew about, that reminded them of that terrible day thirty five years ago

            If only that aura kept him warm. His official uniform, which he had designed, was not suited for cold temperatures. So many things he had done wrong through the years and never cared to correct them. He put his hands beneath his armpits, trying not to freeze.

            Screaming started to come from inside the building, everyone tensed up. Whatever process the throat that was producing those noises was going through, it was a self destructive one. For a moment he wondered if he should step in and do something about it, but the note in which the hollering ended convinced him that it was a lost cause. Now there was only silence. All there was left was to wait for Harmonica to come out. Though that was not what he was actually waiting for.

            The doors opened.

            “HOLD FIRE!” the man screamed. He knew that the person he was actually expecting wanted the criminal alive. Yet the person at the entrance wasn’t the psychopath. It was someone much older, hurt and scared, with one arm missing, and the most baffling thing of all is that he knew her. She was the creepy woman whose partners kept dying. She made two steps and then collapsed on the sidewalk. The man hurried up to her.

            She was mumbling something when he kneeled next to her and picked her up in his arms.

            “D-don’t…she…she did this to me…don’t let her…don’t let her escape…she’s dangerous…she can’t stay alive…”

            “We will take care of that” he said while thinking that it was a funny thing that she had seemed so concerned about Telescopica all those years ago whereas it was Harmonica the one she explicitly asked to ignore. “Does any one know first aid?” he asked to the people around him.

            The officers looked confused and a few shook their heads. He signaled for one of them to come close all the same.

            “Make her stand up and put her arm forwards like this” He said, straightening his back “and stay behind everyone else”

            He had never used his power with this specific purpose but there was no reason for it not to work, the only difficulty was in holding back enough. He no longer had his shades so he couldn’t aim, now he worked by covering an entire area, and everyone around him was just outside of the area, except for the woman’s stump. The light flowed once again; the man noticed how it was actually harder for him now to hold it back from expanding. Usually the use was a form of release; he didn’t have so much to push as he had to relinquish restrain. Not like holding back a sneeze but a perpetual yawn waiting to happen. Theoretically it didn’t need a lot of control to keep it in check but once it started it built up its own momentum.

            The stump was burnt and the wound cauterized, the woman barely even flinched. After this the light receded.

            “Take her to my vehicle so she can rest” he ordered “we’ll wait for Harmonica to come out”

            “Yes sir”

            A couple of minutes passed. One of his officers tapped on his shoulder.

            “What do you want?” he asked, turning.

            Actually, it turned out it wasn’t one of his officers.

            A blonde woman with a tank top, military grade pants and boots and a type of weapon he hadn’t seen in decades was standing behind him. She looked haggard, yet firm. The innumerable scars on her skin didn’t look so much like blemishes as they looked like chisels, as if she was made of stone which, through hardships, had been turned into a work of art. He knew perfectly well who she was.

            “I am looking for my sister” she said “her name is Harmonica, is she inside that building?”

            “Wait…she is your…?” of course. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t connected the dots before.

            “She is the princess, second remaining heir to the throne of the kingdom of the dawning moon, it is my royal duty to find her and bring her back home, I’ll repeat, is she inside that building?”

            “I see” he had been wrong about so many things “yes she is”

            “Then excuse me” she said, pushing him aside.

            “Wait” he extended his arm but dared not touch her, perhaps because he didn’t want to hurt her, perhaps because he didn’t want her to hurt him “let me come with you” after all this time, he had to see the end of this.

            When hearing these words she did something she wouldn’t have done a few days ago. She stopped. Her head peered at him from beyond her shoulder.

            “Who are you?”

            “I’m the Fore…” no, he wasn’t that any longer “I mean…my name is Чернобыль”

            “You are…Jerry Noble?” she said, trying to repeat the words she had heard.

            “No, I apologize, my accent is thick and I have speech impediment since I was kid, I am called after the place I was born in”

            “Oh, I know where you mean” she looked at him some more and then she kept going forwards “you can come as long as you don’t stand in my way”

            “I will not”

            The two of them walked up the steps into the old church and crossed the giant wooden doors to find themselves into a spacious room made of stone and splattered with blood. In the middle of it there was the girl the two of them had been thinking so much about the last few days, on the ground, with an arm stuck in her mouth. Telescopica walked up to her.

            The young woman was unconscious. She was finally here, in front of her, after all this time. She had done it. Telescopica had finally found and caught Harmonica, and Harmonica wasn’t even really there for it. She felt like all this was a bit of an anticlimax. This was the whimper in which it ended? No last fight or nothing? Why was she unconscious anyway?

            “I wonder how she ended up like this” said the man, voicing her thoughts.

            Telescopica grabbed the arm and pulled on it. The limb came off the mouth in quite the Arthurian way, but instead of being held aloft like a legendary sword, it was thrown to the side to be forgotten. She couldn’t believe this, on top of everything else, now Harmonica was a cannibal. Telescopica emitted a single groan of disgust.

            “I do not know if this is worth something, but I want to share, I know what is it like to have…problematic siblings” He said.

            “You do?”

            “The bandit was mine little brother…he was killed by her, not that it is a bad thing that it happened, as I said, he was…problematic”

            “Yeah, well, she’s not going to be your problem much longer, I’m taking her with me”

            She started sliding her weapon off her shoulders so she could figure out how to carry both that and her sister. But first, before she woke up, the girl had to be heavily restrained, and she planned on using the rifle’s holster for that.

            “Before you do that, there was proposition I wanted to make” said the man.

            “What would that be?”

            “Would you marry me?”

            Telescopica stopped the work she was doing on her sister’s wrists and slowly turned towards the man standing next to her. He was looking at her face with those strange eyes of his that seemed to glow in the darkness of the library. His stance was firm and straight and rigid, with his two hands clasped behind his back. Despite all this posturing of confidence she could read an infinite well of awkwardness overflowing within that man, a well that was barely sealed below a heavy lid of natural power, authority and detached indifference. But that lid had been beaten as of lately and it wasn’t quite as hermetic as it once used to be.

            “I do not have romantic feelings towards you” he clarified when she didn’t answer.

            Her lack of a reply hadn’t been a way for her to communicate disdain or to demand clarification; she had honestly been at a loss for words at the proposition.

            “It would be merely business, a political move” he went on “you are heir to throne, I am brother of Tzar, our union would forge a powerful alliance, we could destitute the current monarchs and unite the nations to make world better place, yes?”

            She looked at him for a few seconds and asked.

            “Are you seriously telling me this?”

            “Of course”

            “And I’m not talking just about the marriage, are you seriously proposing that the world can be fixed?”

            “Yes, we are capable, we are powerful, we are smart, but most important of all, we must, for no-one else will”

            She didn’t know what to say to this. She had found many things in her travels, horrors, misery, heroism, hatred, kindness and much more. This was the first time she encountered this, this specific brand of stupidity and innocence and naiveté, this faith, this...what was even the word? Oh, that’s right.

            Hope.

            “Let me think about it” she said, going back to tying Harmonica’s wrists.

            For the moment the first priority was to take Harmonica back into the kingdom, wherein she would be most likely imprisoned for life, or, if the people clamored for it strongly enough, executed. She had accepted that she was her sister and with that she had also accepted that her sister was a monster and had to be judged as such. She wouldn’t kill her out of hatred or vengeance, but if it was deemed just and righteous by a court of her peers, then she would carry the due sentence as the rightful queen of her land.

            Because that is what she was now, the queen. The king was dead and her mother was not fit to rule any more. She had abandoned her kingdom and who knew what she was going to find there once she finally returned.

            If there had been any inner peace found by the accomplishment of her mission, it didn’t last before the prospect of her new oncoming responsibilities sunk in. For a second her hands hesitated whilst knotting shackles. Then she shook her doubts. If she had responsibilities she would do her best to carry them out but she was no longer going to let them consume her.

            She stood up and tried to pick Harmonica in her arms.

            “Do you need help?” asked the man next to her.

            “Yes, carry this, please” she said, handing him the colossal gun.

            He grabbed the rifle and his arms fell under its weight, the gun was as deceptively heavy as she was deceptively strong. Sure she had clear muscle tone but he was still much taller than her and so her size wasn’t that impressive. And yet she had been handling those amounts of metal as if they were feathers.

            She put her sister on her shoulders.

            “Mnsbss…that fucking bitch…” Harmonica mumbled.

            “Yes, here I am sister” said Telescopica “I caught you, at last”

            Both she and the man were making their way out of the building, each carrying their burdens. The cold air of the night blew on their faces as they made their way down the stairs.

            “I’m…not talking about you…fucking idiot” said Harmonica with her voice weak yet accumulating strength by the second “I’m talking about the other asshole…Geometrica…that mirthdamned piece of shit…let me tell you…I am a deranged murderous psychopath but she? She’s just a jerk…fuck”

            “Geometrica is dead, she was killed by one of his people” Telescopica said pointing at the man walking beside her with her head. That was another thought that had just occurred to her, the reason she was going to be queen was because the forces of the empire had captured and killed the first heir, and this guy was now proposing marriage like it was all nice and dandy.

            “We didn’t kill princess” said the man to whom thoughts where also starting to align. He had missed a couple of very obvious things tonight, but now there was one he had figured out all by himself “Your older sister, whom I presume is called Geometrica, is alive and she is in vehicle, resting”

            “What?” asked Telescopica stopping.

            “She was owner of arm we found on your sister’s mouth”

            “You’re lying” why in the hell would this guy start saying such preposterous fabrications?

            “Yep, that would be her” confirmed Harmonica, hanging from her shoulders “she just ripped that shit and beat the fuck out me with it, can you believe it? Only because I said no to her plan of killing the emperor, I mean, learn to handle rejection sweetie”

            “I do not know about that” he said “all I know is that a woman came out from building before you arrived, with one arm missing, a woman who came from your kingdom and whom in the past showed concerns about both of you coming after her”

            Telescopica didn’t know what to do with this information. This was too much too fast, a lot of core structures about her perception of reality were being challenged and they were being challenged by a man she didn’t know that well who worked for the emperor and from Harmonica of all people. This could very well be an elaborate mind trick they were pulling on her. And yet for however much she could distrust both these people, to think they were colluded in any way felt even more ridiculous.

            “what you mean you don’t know about that?” said Harmonica, it took some time for her sister to realize she was talking to the man from the empire “use the maggot you’ve got for a brain, shitface, she was missing an arm and yet she had no other signs of violence on her, whereas I am unconscious and beaten to shit on the ground, the fuck you think happened there?”

            The woman didn’t want to admit it but it made sense, it made too much sense and yet she still couldn’t quite believe that her sister, her older sister, the rightful princess and thus future queen, was alive, and most important of all, that it wouldn’t have to be her, she, Telescopica, wouldn’t have to be the one to take responsibility for the kingdom.

            “I can show her to you if you don’t believe” said the man “she is in vehicle and we have to go there anyway, we can’t stay for long in capital…I am technically outlaw and traitor to empire, in fact we should hurry”

            She nodded, out of words to say. They made their way to the sidewalk and when they reached the small force of rectifiers they were stopped.

            “Sir, we have bad news” said one of the agents to the person they believed to still be the Foremost.

            “What is it?”

            “We are afraid to inform that your vehicle has been…stolen sir”

            “Stolen?”

            “Yes…uh…the victim, the…woman, she viciously attacked the man who was looking over her and before we could do anything she took the car and drove away”

            The former Foremost and the princess of the kingdom looked at each other.

            “Oh, that is so Geometrica” said Harmonica.

            “Thank you for telling me officer”

            The agent stood there, confused for a few seconds since he was expecting a harsh reprimand for failing to recapture the thief, and, since the reprimand didn’t come, he walked back awkwardly. Oblivious to all this, the man known as noble jerry was trying to think about what to do now. The situation was incredibly delicate; the emperor was going to find out any moment now of what he had done at the entrance of the palace and once that happened his reaction was going to be ugly. They had to abandon the city yesterday, but as things stood now the rectifiers where expecting to accompany him and his “prisoners” back to the palace. He had no idea what to do.

            Telescopica, meanwhile, dropped Harmonica to the ground making her moan a loud groan of pain, and grabbed her weapon from her companion’s shoulder.

            “What are you doing?” he asked.

            “I’m taking care of the situation the best way I know how” she replied “alright everyone!” she yelled at the officers around them who turned their heads and instantly fixed their weapons on her “you are all going to stand down, drop your weapons and let us go, is that understood? Now before you say anything, I want you to think about how big is my gun against how big is yours, and to keep in mind that one shot from this thing can kill multiple people at once without a lot of careful aiming, so what do you say?”

            “You gotta be kidding” answered one of the rectifiers “no matter how big that thing is we are still more then you”

            “Oh” she said, lowering her gun to the ground, which made many of the agents visibly relax “I guess you’re right”

            She pressed the trigger.

            The recoil was enough to leave a small crater on the sidewalk and elevate her a good dozen meters on the air. The reverberations knocked everyone to the ground and she took advantage of her trajectory to land safely on the library’s roof. Once there she unleashed the metal rain on the street. BOOM BOOM BOOM. The entire neighborhood trembled with the percussion of her projectiles; her victims didn’t leave so much a corpse as they left an imprint, a silhouette, a splatter on the pulverized concrete. Once she was done she jumped off the roof and with one last BOOM she cushioned her fall.

            “There, took care of that” she said.

            The smoke was starting to fade, leaving a clear view of the gruesome spectacle.

            “That was too loud” said the only man left alive.

            “That is how guns work” Telescopica answered.

            “That is also how you get his attention” he said with a grim voice.

            “And now” Harmonica added, clearly amused “you ask who do you mean by ‘his’”

            **“** **CHERNOBYL** **”**

And this was the way the world ended.

            Horror. Horror and infinite dread. A crimson superlative coagulation of all that is negative became the substance of which the air in their lungs and the blood in their veins and the vitreous humor in their eyes were made of. And it was ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million times unbearable. The world trembled, for the emperor was walking on its soil. All shadows became thicker, and who knew what crawled within them? For this was a world were something like the monster sitting at the throne could exists and there was no rule that stopped reality from being much more horrible than it could be conceived, nothing that stopped the bad from being too much.

            “What-what…oh god and moon and earth and skies, what is that?” asked Telescopica, something inside of her was changing, something fundamental was being disquieted.

            “That is the monstrous emperor’s mirth expiring” said Chernobyl.

            “He sounds mad” interjected Harmonica from the ground.

            “We must run” he added before breaking into a sprint away from the palace that now felt so painfully close, so short a distance to travel for a monster that was walking towards them.

            “Come, sister, I plead, come with me” said Telescopica trying to help her sibling stand up by dragging her arm. Tears were running down her face.

            “You’re really affected by this aren’t you?” the younger woman said, sprinting along.

            “I…I can’t stand it, I have never been this scared in my life”

            “We have to go faster!” insisted Chernobyl, farther ahead “we must reach clear space, a park, a wide street, something like that!”

            “Stop it, please, stop it, I just want it to end, I want it to end, this is horrible and I cant take it and its horrible and please, please, stop, stop, I cant take it I wish it stopped, I wished it ended, please make it end, please, please, oh moon, oh moon, please stop it…”

            “It’s ok, sis” said Harmonica something amiss in her tone of voice “It’s ok, you found me and I’m here with you”

            The criminal seemed tranquil amidst the doom that reality had become. Something in her face indicated an ease of mind and heart, an almost uterine peace resting within her breast. She winked and this didn’t make the horrors go away but Telescopica found it a small reassurance all the same.

            Together, all three of them ran.

            The exertion was exhausting, far too exhausting for what she was supposed to be able to perform. Her body had been trained for decades, by all means she was supposed to be in her top form and yet this short jog across the streets was leaving her wheezing and worse. A malaise was taking over her muscles, not so much tiredness from exercise as it was a lack of energy. She wanted to slow down; she wanted to crawl, to lay, to die. But her sister, with an unusual display of kindness, was pulling on her, giving her words of encouragement.

            “We’re almost there, come on, you can do it!”

            Finally they made it to a derelict parking lot. In the entrance they stopped, Telescopica had to support her own weight on her legs; her breath had quickened and was soon to turn into a cough. She saw her veins in her arms, protruding in unnatural ways, this sickened her to her stomach and a strong sense of unbalance came over her head.

            “I’m going to be sick!” she moaned.

            “Is just Tzar’s power” said Chernobyl, looking up at the sky “and this is not even full blast, this is just what is leaking because of anger”

            She felt dwarfed by this, on top of all that, this was just him being angry, not even properly attacking them. The only way she could think of describing it was as dense. The emperor was something so big and dense and wicked that its mere prescience, its sole intensity of being was enough to affect her in this manner.

            “It’s hopeless!” she cried “there is nothing we can do!”

            “Don’t say that” said Harmonica with…was that honest concern? What was even going on with her? How could she be like this when everything was so, so wrong?

            “But it’s true!” Telescopica insisted “we are nothing! Nothing against him! there is nothing we can do, everything is going to die and end forever and ever, we are so small and miserable against a world that doesn’t care, we are irrelevant, we don’t matter, its not going to get any better than this, it’s over, it’s the end!”

            “No” said Chernobyl and he was looking at the moon on the zenith, shining its light in the darkness that approached and surrounded them “there is hope yet”

            And he raised his arms up in the sky for his power didn’t cover only a surface but also a volume and that volume could be as tall as he wanted for his will was infinite and infinite was his strength.

            The pillar of light arose, clawing back at the dark sky, rejecting the void and joining with the stars, gaining on their light, clamoring that no, that obsidian emptiness was not the natural state of the universe and that yes, light and energy could exist and prevail. He kindled within and the world was brighter for it. His soul reached to the heavens and touched upon the moon’s face, marking it, declaring that we were here and we existed, that we were important enough to leave an impact on reality and that impact couldn’t be denied.

            And heaven answered.

            It started as a star, no brighter than all the others, and then it fell towards them, growing, shaping itself into a concrete structure, until it revealed itself as a chariot, descending in a cloud of smoke and fire, a metal contraption littered with antennae and lanterns, slowly coming down on the empty parking lot and blinding the three people waiting on the parking lot for it.

            Once the vehicle landed and the fires stopped the ship stood there, cooling down for a few seconds until a heavy door, capable of holding an atmosphere worth of pressure against the craving emptiness of space, opened with a sizzling of compressed air finally flowing free. On its frame an old man stood, with a long beard, as white as his hair or bushy eyebrows. He was draped in cushy white clothes and looked too frail to stand under its own weight.

            “What have you done Foremost? You put a blemish on Selene” the creaking voice, as thin as parchment sounded mildly annoyed if anything.

            “I made desperate call in desperate time; I request permission to aboard your ship with my two companions”

            A rumble was approaching, the ground started to shake harder and harder as the emperor neared.

            “The world has gotten worse, which I thought impossible” said the Kosmonavt staring at the horizon “you may come”

            He stepped aside; allowing Telescopica to enter the ship, behind her was Harmonica. Chernobyl stayed on the ground.

            “Aren’t you coming?” asked Harmonica.

            “Someone has to stall him, lest he destroy world” said the man.

            The old man entered his ship and started calibrating the controls to take off again.

            “You must come with us!” said Telescopica from within the capsule.

            “I’ll try, if you see I can not reason with Tzar then leave me behind”

            “You can’t reason with that” said Harmonica pointing at the pulsating mass of shadows that was just turning a corner way down the street and found itself finally within their field of view.

            A black tide, which collapsed on itself and vibrated at dizzying frequencies, with two blue wavelengths at its core. It was crashing towards them, leaving corruption on its wake and as it approached the dread intensified making Telescopica frenzied.

            “I must try, otherwise world might end”

            Chernobyl walked away from them, down the street to meet the bleak entity known as the emperor. The monster stopped its advance and where he stood, cracks formed in a circle, in the street below him and in the walls of the buildings at his sides.

            “Brother, please stop”

            **“DON’T. YOU. DARE; CALL. ME. THAT; YOU. ARENT. KIN.”**

“Cease this madness, there is no point to it, we won’t challenge you any further, we just want to leave and to never return”

            **“YOU. DESERVE. SUFFERING”**

“No-one does” his brother replied “not you, nor the rest of people in this world, this I have finally learned, I see now, the measure of kindness on earth is only that which we provide and nothing else, people need each other in order to…”

            “Ok, quiet, I feel I can do better” said Harmonica as she put one hand on his mouth from behind and the other up to his neck, holding a knife.

            “Harmonica! What are you doing!?” screamed Telescopica with the panic edging her voice.

            “Sister, please, I need to talk with the emperor! Hey, mister Tzar!”

            The monster stood, listening.

            “So you hate me, I gather, you hate everything I’m sure” her tone of voice was so eerily calm and understanding it was unrecognizable “you have many motivations to destroy the world and barely none to hold back, so let me provide some, I wont try to appeal to your sense of kindness like your brother here seemed to be doing, that is not going to work, instead I’ll try to talk to your wickedness, a side of human nature which I’m regretfully familiar with”

            Chernobyl didn’t do anything to stop the woman who held a blade to his arteries, partially because of the surprise but mostly because he was curious as to where the hell was this going.

           “Now, see, I am the person that killed your brother and as it is clear, I’m immune to your powers so, think about this, if you destroy the world you are not going to be the last person in it, your other brother here will survive and I will survive as well, but the thing is that, if the world is destroyed then I will kill him, and then I will come and kill you as well, I can do that, I have, once again, regretfully, a lot of experience with it, whereas you, who I imagine only ever used his powers and raw strength to cause harm, don’t”

            She took a deep breath of air.

            “So think about it, what would the ultimate outcome be? That you and your brothers held power for a few decades until some girl came and killed all three of you? That after all of what you did the last survivor will be me? That you will all, essentially, loose to me? Now I reckon you might be a bit of a sore looser, so again, think about it, is that how you want it to end? Is this what it all amounted to? All of you getting killed by some nobody?”

            Chernobyl was astounded at the gall of that woman, had her hand not being on his mouth he would have still being unable to talk. The emperor seemed equally speechless.

            “So basically what I’m saying is, you’re going to kill us? Do it with your own fucking hands” she dropped Chernobyl and ran inside the ship. It took him a few seconds go gather his wits until he saw that the dark tide was advancing again. The emperor was taking her up on her dare; he was going to kill them with his own hands in exchange of not destroying the world. This was the best outcome available.

            “Blast off!” he yelled as he crossed the entrance to the ship as fast as he could.

            “Aye aye, Foremost” said the Kosmonavt.

            The spaceship started to arise. Not nearly fast enough.

Darkness was almost upon them and the dread within Telescopica’s qualia, reached its breaking point. Her mind was bleached blank, running out of the needed chemicals to feel horror or indeed to feel anything at all. Driven to her base mind state she did the only thing that felt natural. She carved her path through violence.

            A hand was broken shattering the hermetic polymer which composed one of the ships windows and then that same hand held the titanic machinery that was her gun, making it so the cannon peaked out the recently formed opening. And through all of it she didn’t stop screaming.

            “Are you mad!? You can not shoot Tzar!” Chernobyl said, trying to warn the madwoman.

            But she was not going to shoot Tzar.

            The trigger was pulled.

            The resulting explosion imbibed the weapon on the wall on the other side of the ship and also gave the whole capsule the impulse and distance it needed to gain speed and escape the emperor’s grasp.

            The ship, as battered and bruised as the crew within, escaped into the skies.

 

 

 


	18. Chapter 18

            “I have a question sister” asked Harmonica.

            “What is it?”

            Telescopica felt better now that she was beyond the area of influence of the emperor. Her usual resolve was flowing back into her mind, the dread receding, yet not entirely. For now she knew she was capable of being reduced into that state and the mere memory of it was enough to make her cringe.

            Her mind was no longer clouded by irrational fear, no, now the fears that troubled her were entirely rational. Like the fact that she found herself incapable of dealing with the emperor, a problem that very much had to be dealt with. She was horrified that something like that had been allowed to fester on the world for so long and desperation was overcoming her to get rid of it. Yet that desperation was, once again, being pushed back by her hesitance to do it herself. She was scared.

            “Well” her younger sister went on “I was just curious if you made good use of the little boy I left for you in the city with the bridges”

            The woman had to concentrate for a few seconds, so far away that place felt, in more ways than one. The girl was talking about the kid she had slept with and who had later betrayed her by throwing her to the sea off a cliff.

            “I mean” continued Harmonica “I would think that your snatch has rusted shut by now, right? I bet the poor kid couldn’t do anything with you…or, wait, what am I saying? I’m sure your puss is well oiled after all those years of sliding daddy’s throbbing cock in and out, am I right?”

            Apparently her sister was also going back to her old self the farther she got from the capital. Was this a fundamental effect due to the emperor’s power or she just had an innate tendency towards being nicer the more horrible the situation she found herself in was?

            Whatever the case might be she did what she always did. Even before all of this started, when they were two girls living on a mansion. She just ignored her. Telescopica got up and grabbed her gun to pull it free of the metal wall where it had incrusted. While she did this she noticed the ugly glares she was getting from the Kosmonavt. She couldn’t blame him. The damage was by all means aesthetic, no vital cables or tubes had been damaged, but still, it was a blemish on something that after all these years could very well be considered and extension of his own body.

            The ship was small, it was small even for one person, all four of them where just too much. Some parts of it were worn down, the sheer routinely friction with the Kosmonavt’s skin for years had eroded very specific parts of it to the point that, to her keen eyes, this was a clear tale of what the man had done over and over for years as if she was witnessing it live. The room in which they were was one of two: the cockpit, a conical cabin with the driving seat reclined, facing directly upwards; and the living quarters where the Kosmonavt slept, ate and generally lived. The passengers where pressed against the walls and the window that she had broken was covered with some tarp that had been heavily duck taped to the frame. The tarp was now vibrating at high frequencies due to the speed of the vessel and the friction with the air generating a very annoying note that grated everyone’s ears.

            She managed to pull her gun and then she sat back in her cramped little corner, holding the weapon as if it were a safety blanket. Harmonica went on.

            “So what are you going to do about Geometrica then? Because even if we get to the kingdom before her, she will eventually show up and take the throne away from you and then is war on the empire and then the end of the world…I mean for you, not for me and certainly not for fishlips over here” she said, pointing at Chernobyl with her thumb.

            “How did you call me?” he asked.

            “Ignore her” said Telescopica “she just likes to cause trouble anyway she can, and since now her only tool are her words she is going to use that to drive us insane, don’t let her”

            “I can not help but find what she says concerning, this so called Geometrica seems like real threat to everyone” insisted the man.

            “It has to be a lie, you can’t trust what she says” insisted Telescopica.

            “I do not believe that” said the man “I have interacted with that woman in the past, I always found her…disquieting somehow, she was implicated with many inexplicable deaths …on top of fact that she suspiciously stole car after suspiciously loosing arm…”

            “There is nothing suspicious about it, she” the woman said, pointing at her younger sister with her head “ripped it off, obviously”

“Now why the fuck would I do that?” answered Harmonica who sounded honestly offended.

            “Because you’re insane! You’re a crazy serial killer who has done nothing but cause horror and misery across the land! Why wouldn’t you rip someone’s arm off?”

            “Then why was she unconscious when we found her?” insisted Chernobyl “how does situation play off? She rips Geometrica’s arm and then Geometrica somehow beats her into submission?”

            “But…!” Telescopica insisted “the alternative is just as impossible! Did Geometrica rip her own arm and then beat Harmonica with it? Why?”

            “Because she’s insane, duh!” said Harmonica “just like me, just like you, just like father was and just like just about every motherfucker on this planet, but specially our family! You really think that Geometrica had any chance of being a normal stable human being? Bitch, she was born before the world was cracked! She got to see how was the world before and what it turned into afterwards, holy fuck, that would break anyone! Especially someone as young as she was when it happened, I mean, come on! You’re stupid but you’re not that stupid!”

            All the passengers looked at the young woman for a few seconds, surprised that she was capable of being that introspective. Telescopica particularly was a little put off by this. She had spent so long thinking of her sister as a force of nature, analyzing her actions and thought processes in terms of a wild animal or a violent child. To see this level of self awareness in her was shocking.

            Yet all the shock in the world wouldn’t convince her of what was being said. She could try and accept it, to take it as a hypothetical and work off of that, but to truly believe that Geometrica was this dangerous evil mastermind, when she was still trying to process that she was alive in the first place, was too much a leap for her.

            “And who the fuck are you to contradict me anyway?” Harmonica went on “when you never interacted with neither of us in your life? What the fuck do you know of her or me for that matter? What the fuck do you know of anything except what father told you? Shit, I bet the only real reason you’re chasing me is because you’re mad I killed him! I bet you made sure to stuff him and mount him on your bedroom so you could swallow his eternally stiff, rotten cock in between training sessions before you came chasing me across the kingdom! I’m more surprised you didn’t kill mom before I killed dad, so jealous of her you must have been!” the woman was seriously working herself up as she went on, with her tone of voice slowly rising with every word.

            “Ok that’s enough…” said Telescopica trying to rein her in.

            “NO, FUCK YOU! YOU CHASE ME ALL ACROSS THE LAND BECAUSE I’M DANGEROUS AND, OK, FAIR ENOUGH, BUT WHEN I FUCKING RELENT AND WANT TO HONESTLY FUCKING HELP, WHEN I WANT TO FUCKING SAVE THIS STUPID, PUTRID MISERABLE WORLD AND WARN YOU ABOUT SOMETHING SERIOUS YOU DON’T EVEN FUCKING LISTEN, YOU UGLY SACK OF SHIT, YOU STUPID STUBBORN WHORE, I WANT TO HELP FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE AND THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING REACT YOU BITCH, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU AND YOUR TRAINING AND YOUR STUPID FUCKING HIGH HORSE, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU”

            “Stop screaming, please” said the Kosmonavt from his seat “if it helps I do believe you, now, I pray, stay quiet”

            “You haven’t earned anyone’s trust after all that you did” insisted Telescopica.

            “Fuck you” answered the sister more quietly, still hurt “and look how I’m not screaming because the old man was nice about asking it and yet you still try to provoque me, fuck you, you bitch”

            There was silence for a few seconds on the metal vessel.

            “Thank you” said the Kosmonavt to Harmonica.

            “You’re welcome” she answered, curtly.

            “We’re going to reach the station in a few minutes, by the by” added the space man to everyone else.

            At no point had they abandoned earth atmosphere or entered orbit, their entire journey thus far had been propelled entirely by rocket fuel and air currents. In the distance a relatively small base was erected, in the middle of a couple of mountains, the place found and restored by the Foremost decades ago where, for a few years, in the paltriest of its forms, the space program of the empire was allowed to flourish and exist in the shape of that one vessel piloted by that one man. Once they reached the station they would perform whatever reparations were needed and refuel the ship.

            “I think we should then decide what next move ought to be” said Chernobyl “Telescopica, whether you believe us or not, you should still meet with Geometrica before she reaches kingdom, talk to her, confront her about her supposed death, get read on her and then decide if we are telling truth”

            “And what are you going to do?” asked Telescopica.

            “I’ll go back to capital and…I guess I’ll take down Tzar”

            “Uhm, weren’t we discussing about how trying to do that would cause the end of the world?”

            “This is different, I know protocols to…get rid of people with powers like ours, originally developed to deal with Karachay but applicable to me and to Tzar all the same…hopefully”

            “What do you mean hopefully?”

            “They were developed for Karachay, that is to say, someone much less powerful than emperor, in fact now that I think of it, they did not really work on me…” said he, pausing for a few seconds, realizing the implicatins of what he had just said, then he shook his head and went on “but that was different, I am sure I can figure out way to apply them to Tzar so we can…so we can…uhm…so we can kill…” Chernobyl took one big gulp of saliva and looked at the ground “so he can die”

            “Chernobyl, don’t be offended but I don’t think you are ready or capable of doing it” said Telescopica, as kindly as she could, which was not a lot “I think if we are to do this, and I firmly believe we must, we should send someone who can actually pull the trigger when it counts”

            “Well then” he answered “also no offense but I saw you react to Tzar’s influence, I do not believe you can do it either”

            “I wasn’t talking about me, though I’m not discarding the option entirely, I was talking about the other known person capable of resisting the emperor’s powers” she pointed with her open palm to her younger sister who, sulking until that point of the conversation, perked up with a smile.

            “Oh. My. Mirth! You do love me you whore!” she said with glee.

            “Let’s not go that far” answered the woman “I’m just acknowledging that you are useful for this situation”

            “You are just going to send her” Chernobyl said, incredulous “by herself to kill Tzar?”

            “That’s why I said I’m not discarding the possibility of me going along, I know it’s going to affect me but we all know that it affects her as well, apparently whatever it does to me it does the exact opposite on her so I’m sure if we…ugh I cant believe I’m saying this, but if we stick together, we can support each other and…well, we can do it”

            “AWWWW I LOVE YOU TOO SIS!!!”

            Harmonica threw her arms around her sister who, without skipping a beat, held her weapon between her arms to both keep the girl away and knock the air out of her lungs. As Harmonica recovered from the punch Telescopica threw the weapon to the side and grabbed one of her arms to turn her around and immobilize her in a lock. Through this contorted position one of Harmonica’s hands was jutting out, holding a knife. Telescopica strangled that hand’s wrist forcing it to let go of the blade.

            “You were seriously going to stab her?” asked Chernobyl, more curious than anything “right here and now after what we have been talking about?”

            “Pshhh” said the younger woman, with a strangled voice due to the constraint that her sister was putting her through “that was just my way of saying ‘I love you too’, that is how we interact, she knows this, right sis?”

            “Next time you do that I’m going to break one of your arms, understood? And not in a way it that can be put back together” replied the older sister.

            “See? That’s what I mean” said the girl, undisturbed by the threat.

            “Are you sure of this?” insisted Chernobyl.

            Telescopica thought about it.

            She didn’t want to admit it but there was a neurotic part of her, a part she suspected she shared to a certain degree with both her sisters, a part that only in very recent times she had learned to ignore, that wanted desperately to be under the emperor’s influence again. She was terrified of his power and she couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t abide that there was something she couldn’t do, a place of the world that was barred from her because of how dangerous it was. But more than that, already just thinking about it, just remembering it, was enough to make her body shake and break into cold sweat and that was far too much. That there was something she couldn’t talk about, that she couldn’t even think about without it having a terrible effect on her, was intolerable. She had to fling herself towards it, obsessively; it was a wound that she had to poke, a pain she had to self inflict until she grew numb to it. Now she knew it was just foreign influence, if she was aware her mental state was not to be trusted at that time, that it was being artificially caused by the enemy, then she could push through it. She had learned long ago to ignore physical pain or weakness; she could do the same with the emotional kind.

            A small voice within her (that sounded not unlike that of Kommando) was telling her that this was stupid and that she should know better by now. But the truth is that the emperor had to be destroyed and only her sister could. And she was not going to leave her sister alone after all this time.

            “Yes, I’m sure” she answered.

            “Very well, then what are we going to do about Geometrica?” Chernobyl asked.

            “You go after her”

            “Yeah, punch the bitch in the face for me, will ya? And tell her it comes from me” said Harmonica, still constricted by her sister.

            “Just capture her, ok? Don’t hurt her” went on Telescopica “I mean, I’m still not sure if she is who you say she is, and if she is, I’m still not sure if she is as dangerous as you say, so just…just capture her and then let me see her and if she is not what you say we can just let her go, and if she is like you say she is still incapacitated so…again, just capture her” While she said all this she moved her arms around so she could still hold her sister with only one hand whilst with the other she grabbed her gun and hanged it from her shoulder.

            “I can try” he answered, noncommittally.

            “I’m serious, and I know I’m about to go kill your brother and you probably have some issues with that but…she is not as bad as him”

            “Right, she’s worse” interrupted Harmonica “she is actually willing to destroy the world”

            “She is not as inherently dangerous then” said Telescopica “you are more powerful than her and I’m sure also smarter so you can figure out the way not to kill her, ok?” she was walking closer and closer to the hermetically sealed door, extending her arm to the lever “so, ok, explain me the protocols to deal with the emperor”

            “Uh…you…well you are not supposed to cut or wound or break skin in anyway, you have to leave him unconscious and then…you kill by asphyxiation or poison…or anything that doesn’t break body, yes?” he said this with a voice that didn’t show any confidence in the capacity of his listeners to carry out any of his instructions “it is going to be difficult, chances are he will go back to throne room, I must warn you, he never sleeps so waiting for that is not going to work, there is man called Maurice within palace, tell him you come from me, he will help”

            “Great, I’ll keep that in mind” said Telescopica, finally laying her hand on the lever to open the airlock.

            “What are you doing?” asked the Kosmonavt “we are hundreds of meters on the air!”

            “Don’t worry, I have my gun” she said.

            “You are leaving now?” asked Chernobyl.

            “I’m sorry but I can’t stand to be here sitting any longer” she answered, letting go of her sister “now, you, hop on my back and don’t do anything funny or I’ll drop you, ok?” said she to her younger sibling.

            “Oh dear me, if you are about to do what I think you’re about to do then I wouldn’t think of it!”

            The younger woman stretched her arms and then jumped on her sisters back.

            “Grab on to something!” said Telescopica tho the men while pulling on the lever.

            “No! Wait!” tried to yell the Kosmonavt but it was too late.

            The decompression was brutal, air rushed through the aperture sucking the two women into the skies and making about half a dozen different alarms go off in front of the spaceman. The wind was ear shattering yet Chernobyl, making use of all his strength to hang on to whatever he could find in the walls, advanced at a snail’s pace towards the door. The closer he got to where air was being sucked out the more his boots skidded against the floor yet he advanced undaunted.

            Once he reached the metal frame he closed the vessel and peace was restored within. In the distance he heard an explosion indicating that the sisters were in their course to fulfill their mission and he had to do as much.

            “Your friends are no longer allowed in my ship” said the Kosmonavt.

            “Do not worry about that” Chernobyl answered.

            ‘I am not sure they’ll even be alive for that to be an issue’, he thought ‘I am not sure anyone will’.

           

           

 


	19. Chapter 19

            On hindsight she had been rather forward thinking when ripping her left arm. She could reach the stick to change gears with ease. Still, driving a motorized vehicle was a complex task, with only one hand, on roads such as these. Cracked and worn down as they were, with the occasional river interrupting which forced her to take long, long detours. Most gas stations she encountered were completely emptied by now thanks to the bandit, but he at least was no more on these roads and for that she took full credit. Sure, her sister had helped some and her rebellion struck the killing blow, but she had been the one that put all of those pieces in movement, she was the one who had decided the situation in the end, this was her view of the world and most would be hard pressed to talk her out of it.

            The desert at her sides had nothing to offer in terms of view, no trees, no sand, no shelter. Not even heat or sun. It was barely dawn and above her was an overcast sky which clouds, though thick enough to cover the sun, promised no rains. Only cold and desolation surrounded her and it all was still warmer than the look on her face. If there was any emotion stirring within, it was just impatience before the prospect that her new plan would be excruciatingly slow. To reach the kingdom, to officially take her position as queen, to declare war on the empire, to send troops toward it and for those troops to finally reach the emperor who would react suitably. Too slow, too tortuous. She had been convinced that the world would have ended by yesterday and here it all was, still miraculously standing. It was almost too much to bear, but she wouldn’t crumble. She just wasn’t capable. To do so would have meant to be vulnerable, to despair would have meant there was any understanding inside of her of pain and loss, it would have meant that there was some form of softness at her core and there simply wasn’t. This was not posturing, she wasn’t conscious of any of it, this was simply her nature. Once you beat her and worn her down and stripped all her defenses bare you found that there was nothing there but more defenses, more callousness and more cold stone all the way down.

            A light came from above the clouds that was not the sun and through the layer of condensation descended a metal vessel, a spaceship according to the books she had read long ago about times longer ago. The Ship landed in the road ahead of her and she had to stop. A metal door opened and from inside came Chernobyl, who descended from the vehicle, as tall and straight as he always was, holding his hands on his back. And yet under this new light she could see he had changed a lot since the times he visited her because of government affairs. He had a shadow of a beard insinuating itself in his face, his shades were gone revealing eyes that were ever so aglow and his uniform was rumpled and out of order, with more than a few buttons here and there loose and its collar opened. This was the same man, but he was not longer the Foremost citizen.

            “Citizen Geometrica” he said, his voice carried sharp and crisp in the cold morning air.

            “Foremost” she answered, monotonous.

            “I am no longer that”

            “I gathered, but still, Foremost”

            The man furrowed his lips thinking, there were some serious indicators that, from the three sisters he had met, she could very well be the worst one. He had no idea what she was capable of and how she was supposed to operate, was this greeting some subtle form of psychological warfare? Was her insistence in addressing him as the title that he had lost a reminder of his loss? Or was it meant to point out that no matter how much he insisted he had changed he was still the same fiend who blindly worked for the empire? Or perhaps it was none of this and she was just fucking with him.

            Whatever the case might be.

            “I came here to restrain, do not consider this formal arrest, merely precaution, you will be set free in couple of days, able to go on your way, please cooperate and come peacefully” he had said speeches like these in the past which didn’t sit well with the remainder he had just received.

            “You can only enforce those words” she said “with threats of violence and the only violence you’re capable of wielding is your power”

            “Yes” he said, not sure where she was going with this.

            “But how long will it take?”

            “For what?”

            “For you to become like your brother”

            His eyebrows dropped a fraction, covering the upper side of his eyes.

            “I am not like him”

            “Not yet, not for a long time, you are capable of using it just like him yet you used your glasses to focus your energy all this time” she started walking closer to him with a small limp “such energies, they can’t flow through a human body without changing it in some fashion, without having some effect on the flesh…or the mind, you focused it through an object that was separate from you and so you managed to stave off most of the side effects, the bandit…the bandit concentrated it through just one portion of his body, his hand, and leaving besides the fact that he was the weaker of the three, the effects on is psychology were still disastrous, but the emperor…he used his whole being, he let it flow unrestricted and after decades he was engorged into the monster that now sits at the throne”

            “Do not walk any closer” he tried to warn her, with doubt seeping into his voice.

            She went on.

            “You probably already know this because you were with him back then but I had to read about it in the old reports that my father kept, from before the war, about how every time he destroyed a country the area obliterated became bigger, regardless of how big the country he wanted to take over was…he lost control of it, the more you use it the bigger it will get, how many times you were forced to do so now? Without your shades? How big will it be if you use it now? How big will it be the next time? Because there will be a next time, there will be others like me, perhaps not as smart but certainly as willing to attack you”

            “I said stop!” he insisted.

            She ignored him.

            “I can see it already, the shadows in your face grown ever so darker, the size of your frame just a tad more voluminous, I can almost hear an echo on your voice that wasn’t there before”

            She was almost a few paces from him; a woman well in her forties with one arm removed, limping and weak. And yet he was almost cowering from her, taking a few steps back to keep distances. In a very humbling instant he whished he had a gun so he could just shoot her and so he finally understood what Hector had been trying to explain to him, the feeling of desperation where you’re threatened by someone else and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop them. For he believed she was right, he could feel the cosmic pressure of the energies within him, stronger than they had ever been, a pressure that had not been there back when he had his shades, coupled with this came the sinking feeling that he might have to live with that pressure inside for the rest of his life. Only getting stronger every time he dared use them.

            On another level this was a strangely heartwarming moment. His brother had struggled with this for thirty five years but the world was still standing. With a surge of emotion he considered the possibility that Tzar perhaps truly cared on some level, to last so long holding all of this inside of him.

            But none of this mattered, the fact was that he was unwilling to use his power whereas she was getting closer and all it would take was one single cut from her, a single scratch or bite, to make him go nuclear. He had nothing at his disposal to stop her. Nothing but his words.

            “You can help us!” said Chernobyl, almost loud enough for it to be considered yelling “your sisters are going to kill Tzar, the emperor will die”

            Geometrica stopped.

            “This is what you wanted, yes? To kill emperor? So that world can become better place? Our lands will unite, the bandit is dead, the emperor soon will be too, we will become allies, your kingdom will no longer be prey to empire, this was your purpose”

            She didn’t answer. She just stared at him with her tired, so terribly tired, eyes. Her blank expression, her dead face, and the endless lack that was beneath it all.

            He considered running back to the ship; closing the door and just letting the blast burn her, and then land on top of the charred corpse to crush it, just to be sure. He didn’t do that. He had been asked to caught her alive and for once he was going to try his damnest to solve a situation without violence.

            And  meanwhile, she saw. She saw in the gleaming eyes a scene.

            The scene was that of a terrible woman, with the bulbous belly of pregnancy, strange etchings and tattoos concentrating around the navel, wherein all her mass seemed to have flowed leaving nothing for the rest of her body, a woman who couldn’t stand under her own weight, lying on a dirty alleyway, accompanied by her son, a skinny kid with murderous hatred on his face. Her arm was raised, asking, pleading, blood coating her fingers, to a man standing on a circle.

            And the man was smiling.

            And the man was smiling.

            And the man was smiling.

            And in his eyes she could see herself reflected.

            And within that reflection within a reflection she could see her own eyes, reflecting nothing, nothing at all.

            But hell.

            And the man was smiling because a deal had just been made.

            Telescopica raised her eyebrows. Chernobyl almost jumped at that. She was smiling while looking at the sun, rising through the wedge between the horizon and the layer of clouds in the sky, tinting her face a warm and soft shade of orange.

            “Odd” she said “I find that it never was” she turned her face at him, still smiling “you made me realize something”

            “What is that?” he asked cautiously.

            “I shouldn’t have cared so much about stopping other people’s suffering, only mine”

            She jumped at him, her one hand clawing at him, and his instincts kicked in. He wielded the hammer with which he had solved every problem all his life and the light consumed her. The light consumed everything.

            It consumed the road beneath his feet and the car in front of him and the ship behind and the man inside the ship. It rose to the sky and it expanded across the desert. It engulfed, swollen, consuming irradiant and ineffable. Eradicating, laying waste, expanding free, released, ready to encompass the world, the solar system, the universe, reality.

            But he held back, not as fast as he would have liked, but he held back and the world was saved. With the exception of the area in which he stood, for the pillar of light was still there, sterilizing that portion of existence and try as he might he couldn’t make it recede. He took a step forward and the area of obliteration moved with him.

            **NO.**

He said.

**I.CONTROL. YOU.**

The pillar didn’t shrink.

**THIS. IS. NOT; HOW. IT. ENDS.**

The light was still everywhere, perhaps but a little dimmer.

**I.WILL. NOT; ALLOW. MY. SELF; TO. BECOME. A.**

**M**

**O**

**N**

**S**

**T**

**E**

**R.**

The light finally went away, leaving in its place scorched bedrock and a lonely man who thought he could make the world a better place.

* * *

 

            He now saw the truth. The universe hated him.

            And it hated specifically him, Maurice Loeb.

Oh sure, there were other people suffering in the world but they were just causalities, props, inconsequential losses as a result of living in the same world as the man that reality had a hateboner for.

            That was the outcome of misery, that it warped perspectives. When one suffers, one has to be the one that suffers the most. One’s pain is always the most immediate pain imaginable. Still, it was hard to blame Maurice for thinking this way when he was the closest (in terms of physical proximity and no other) to the emperor who’s mirth had expired.

            Life had become much harder to endure as of late, ever since he had become the new Foremost, a title which was dubious at best since it had been invested by a traitor, but considering the previous Foremost was dead and the emperor seemed in no mood to appoint a new one he would have to do. And what the hell would he have to do?

            Well, going to his previous boss’ office to read his papers and get up to speed with his new position sounded like a good idea but then again, lying on the floor and do nothing was equally alluring, almost as alluring as to just keep on walking forward across the warped halls of the palace, passing by the other inhabitants, equally as filled with malaise as he was, and traversing the shadows of the place until his feet could carry him no longer, to finally die, forgotten in the darkness. But none of this was to be.

            When the Tzar had returned he had been lying on a puddle of his own piss, crying, much like the other politicians. The emperor stepped on some of the bodies on the floor making them explode on his way back to the throne room and nobody flinched or bothered to clean the mess. Once the emperor sat back on his throne he called for Maurice and where will had failed, abject terror succeeded in making him stand up and carry on.

            His orders had been clear: go to the radio station and send a message to the Kosmonavt’s vessel communicating that unless the three of them surrendered themselves to be executed in the palace, he would kill half the population in the empire, not by using his powers, no, but by the old fashion ways. And by ‘he’ he wasn’t meaning the emperor but Maurice, he was the one who would have to carry this genocide in his current position as the Foremost citizen. And he was going to do it, both his mental and emotional state were too weakened and frail to oppose the orders of the emperor but they were also too compromised to carry them out with energy and efficiency. So this was going to drag out for a long while. As far as he was aware, the rest of his life was going to be slugging his way across the empire, killing people with his own hands, over and over. A poor miserable devil making his way through hell, plucking the souls of the damned. Forever. All because the Foremost rescued him.

            How he hated that man now.

He was making his way to his new office, in order to search for data about the citizen’s addresses. Had the emperor ordered to kill everyone he would have just gone out the street and start the massacre but since “only half” had been specified he had to keep track and thus a list was needed.

            When he entered the room he found inside it the woman who destroyed his hometown, rummaging through the papers on his desk. He barely felt anything at this except mild annoyance that the documents might be out of order now , a ridiculous thought crossed his mind about how petty could she be that she was capable of doing that just for the nuisance of it.

            “Telescopica, we have guests” she said, raising her eyes to the man, calm.

            From behind the desk rose another woman he had never seen before, with hair as blonde as the girl next to her and holding what he had to qualify as the biggest rifle in the world. Harmonica was covered in blood, her clothes torn to shreds and with plenty of teeth missing from her mouth, and yet the woman standing next to her with the gun, as unharmed as she was, looked worse. She looked like him.

            Sympathy due to their similar states might have happened had he not been as dead on the inside as he was. If anything he was angry at her for reminding him of his situation, for showcasing how there wasn’t even the consolation of a heaven for others, that this was the unique and absolute nature of being alive.

            “What are you doing here?” he asked with a haggard voice.

            “We’re looking for whatever drugs might be used to subdue the Foremost” answered the younger of the intruders “you know? As containment protocol?”

            He knew what they were talking about. He had been debriefed on the matter the day he started his job. He remembered wondering if any of the politicians had ever tried to use those protocols to get rid of the Foremost or even, why not? The emperor himself. The next day he met the emperor face to face for the first time and he understood why not. Right now he understood why not. Because this was reality, and reality was terrible because it was perfectly terrible, and for it to be truly perfectly terrible it had to, on top of everything else, be also real. The emperor would never end. This would never end. His job would never end. And thinking of that he decided to start it right here and now killing half the citizens in this room.

            “What are you doing?” asked Harmonica when she saw the man stagger towards her with his hands raised to her.

            “S-stop!” yelled Telescopica panicking, the colossal cannon wavering every which way.

            “Telescopica, calm down, this guy is clearly not a threat to anyone”

            The woman took out the remains of her giant overcoat and used it to grab the man’s hands, tying them together. He didn’t even put up a fight, just accepted defeat and fell to his knees.

            “Now, I’m going to ask again, and I will hope that you understand it’s for the best to answer, do you know where are the drugs to subdue the Foremost?”

            He just nodded, he didn’t have the energy to do much else.

            “And where are they?”

            “Meeeehhhhhh…..” the guy was in no shape to cooperate.

            “Oh goddess, it’s hopeless” whined Telescopica, seeing their lack of results with the questioning.

            “Dear mirth, you two! Hey, look at me!” she said grabbing the guy by the shoulders “I am ordering you to tell me where the fucking drugs are ok? That is an order, you hear? An order, now answer!”

            “They are in the rectifier’s office” he said, falling in step with the only form of input-output of information he was capable of understanding anymore “down the hall, third door to the left”

            “Thank you!” she said, letting him go. He fell into a limp puddle on the floor “and be happy, you just helped save the world, come sister, see? We’re making progress, it can be done, it’s not hopeless!”

            “Right” the woman with the weapon said, following her sister, not sounding convinced at all “it is not hopeless, it is not, it is not…”

            They left the room. The man on the floor stood up and started following them like a sleepwalker. At first Harmonica worried that they wouldn’t be able to traverse the halls as quietly as they could, considering one of them was shaking feverishly and the other was basically a zombie. This proved to be superfluous since most of the forces in the empire were either dead or incapacitated by now. They reached their destination and inside the room they found what they were looking for. A cupboard with a cardboard box clearly meant for six flasks but with only five inside it. They were all labeled “CHLOROPHORM”.

            “Ok, big dude” said Harmonica talking to the mindless officer “now tell me, when does the emperor eat? Who sends food to him?”

            He stood there with his gaze lost on the wall behind her.

            “Answer her!” shrieked Telescopica with a little too much shrill.

            Once again, it was easier for him to follow orders than to resist.

            “I have not seen him eat or drink in my time here” he droned “I haven’t seen him sleep or rest or go to the bathroom or do anything besides sit in his throne and give orders”

            “But that’s impossible!” protested Harmonica “he HAS to eat something, he has to sustain himself somehow”

            “It’s impossible…he is impossible…” muttered Telescopica under her breath.

            “Quiet, please, I’m thinking” said her sister “now, he exerts energy, this much is obvious, he moves around, he is alive, but how? I mean, he has energy to spare, he has enough energy to destroy the world but then does that energy keep him alive somehow?”

            “He is inhuman…he is unnatural…he is monstrous…”

            “Telescopica, i am being uncharacteristically nice due to whatever psychological effects the Tzar’s mirth has on me and even then I’m getting tired of your shit, please, shut up, no, wait, what did you said? That he is inhuman? Then…I mean you are right, but is he so inhuman by now that he no longer needs normal sustenance like us normal humans do? Fuck, then maybe he IS immortal, that would suck”

            “It sucks, and it’s going to last forever” said Maurice, adding his lamentations to Telescopica.

            “I’m just going to ignore you guys unless you happen to say something unexpectedly poignant, ok? So he has all that power but he can’t really generate it himself, at least not through conventional means but then how? Come on Harmony! Think! He is destruction, something you’re well versed at, how does he function?”

            “He is destruction…destruction and doom…” said the woman next to her.

            “And all that doom and fire shall rise again…to consume us all” recited the man.

            “Fire! Wow, it turns out you guys were actually useful! Yes, fire, that is how he operates, you don’t need a lot of energy to start a giant fucking fire, just some tinder and a spark, he is the spark and the tinder…I don’t fucking know, matter? Air? Perhaps just reality itself? The point is once he starts it becomes a chain reaction which grows and grows, finding more fuel the more it expands, and he can harness some of it, maybe even store it”

            “Then why doesn’t it affect you?” Telescopica asked in what would have sounded like a proper contribution had it not come out so whiningly, like a kid who’s jealous that her sibling gets more desert after dinner.

            “Oh but it does! Look at me! It doesn’t consume me! I absorb it! I can actually use that energy! I mean, I don’t think I can control it, I just soak it in and it helps my body and mind, but like, that is good enough I feel”

            “This is useless, is not helping us to defeat the Tzar!”

            “I’m spitballing, ok? Taking down something this big requires a lot of careful thinking and consideration, what? You think I took down that city the first day I arrived? Fuck no, I studied the place, got the lay of the land, calculated exactly in what order to destroy the bridges to get the maximum suffering, being a deranged maniac takes a lot of thought, for your information!”

            “You…destroyed my home” said the man, hurt.

            “Yes, and as of right now I am aware it was a terrible thing to do but the weird thing is that the Tzar’s power is keeping me from feeling crushingly guilty about it, so sorry, but not that sorry”

            “I…I hate you”

            “And you are totally in your right to do so but as of right now we have a bigger fish to fry, you’re right about something though, sis, none of this is telling us how to drug the Tzar,”

            “You can’t attack him, you can’t defeat him, it’s hopeless” insisted Maurice.

            “It’s hopeless, hopeless, hopeless….” Repeated Telescopica.

            Harmonica was convinced that if it weren’t for her mind being nourished by the emperor’s mirth, she would have killed herself by spending more than five minutes in these people’s company. She wondered how everyone else in the capital was doing, suspecting that the day of tomorrow would find a lot of suicides across the city. Another reason to hurry.

            “Ok I think there is not a lot of place for being clever here then” she said “we are going to play this the direct way, I’ll just walk into the room and throw this entire box at his face and if it takes me down too then whatever, I’ll trust you’ll find the way to asphyxiate his unconscious body, worst case scenario we die and the Tzar is placated somehow, we still have his little brother to come up with a new idea, what do you guys think?”

            There weren’t a lot of answers beyond what by now were becoming platitudes.

            “I was joking about the worst case scenario by the way; let’s go, to the throne room”

            The trio walked once again across the halls of the palace, where shadows were starting to acquire an almost goopy quality to them and the walls looked less like stone and more like loins, seen from the inside. Leading the march was Harmonica carrying the box with the glass tinkling in her arms. She didn’t need guidance to find the innermost chamber, she just had to listen how much the whimpering of her companions intensified depending on the path she took.

            Finally they encountered the floor-to-ceiling doors, leading to the throne room. The wood was expanding and contracting like the lungs of a whale, cracks and splinters forming all across their surface, just as with every other surface on this world. This was it. The final confrontation. On this night, in this room, through violence a better world would be achieved.

Harmonica opened the doors.

            Instantly Maurice and Telescopica fell to the ground, screaming.

                                                    “LOVE!!!HAPPINESS!!!JOY!!!BEAUTY!!!LOVE!!!HAPPINESS!!!JOY!!!BEAUTY!!!LOVE!!!HAPPINESS!!!JOY!!!BEAUTY!!!LOVE!!!HAPPINESS!!!JOY!!!BEAUTY!!!LOVE!!!HAPPINESS!!!JOY!!!BEAUTY!!!”

            What they were yelling she was feeling, tenfold, hundredfold and this gave her strength. Harmonica ignored the plight of her comrades and kept walking forward, into the darkness. There was no floor, there were no walls, only darkness and the two blue fires staring at her.

            **“NOTHING. BUT. THIS”** Said the Universe **“LIKE. THIS. FOREVER.”** said the Truth **“THIS. IS. REALITY.”** Said the monster.

            “And this is a human defying it” Harmonica answered.

            She ran towards the void, opening the flasks and when she was just at a couple meters of the emperor, she spilled the contents all over the two blue stars.

            Nothing changed. The chemicals vaporized entirely mid air, they decomposed into their constituent elements and then those decomposed into their constituent particles and then those were reabsorbed by the quantum foam of space time.

            “Ok, that didn’t work out” she said, stopping and turned around to run away. But a hand with fingers, each the size of her torso, grabbed her entire body like a doll and picked her up. Whatever continents were holding her they were slowly dragging her towards the blue lights in order for her to be swallowed by their endless fire.

            The world was going to end and all she could feel was unstoppable happiness.

* * *

 

            The world was going to end and she was in the floor screaming. She didn’t even know what she was screaming, she was just doing whatever her body found natural, just like falling to the ground had felt natural once she was no longer able to hold it standing. She remembered promising herself that she was not going to allow this to happen, that no matter what, she was in control of her body and that regardless of how she felt or what thoughts came to her mind, she could still dictate when her own muscles responded and thus how she would act. This seemed to no longer be the case, particularly because for the last hour her mind had insistently reminded her that there was just no point to it. Why bother? Just let it happen. And so she would squirm on the floor, screaming at the top of her lungs whatever words her mind was randomly coming up with and let this be the way she was going to live whatever the rest of her life was.

            **“NOTHING. BUT. THIS;LIKE. THIS. FOREVER.;THIS. IS. REALITY.”**

            See? That was a voice that made sense, one should just listen to that voice and be done with it.

            “And this is a human defying it” answered her sister.

            The way she had fallen was so that she could see what was happening with Harmonica by just twisting her face a little. From her sideways view in the floor she saw how the woman chugged the liquid at the-thing-that-was-right and the liquid disappeared into thin air. Then the woman would try to turn around and run away but a hand the size of a truck would grab her and start carrying her towards the thing-that-was-right. Well? What did it matter? Maybe now her sister would finally learn how life was supposed to work.

            And then the woman who was just about to die said.

            “WELP, I TOLD YOU YOU’D NEVER EVER EVER CATCH ME SISTER! I. WIN!”

            No.

            This was stupid.

            Telescopica stopped screaming and stood up, holding her weapon in her hands.

            Unbearable, intolerable, atrocious phenomena corrupted her mind and body in an endless fractal of etc, etc, etc, who gives a shit? After all this time, after all that happened Harmonica was NOT going to escape. Simple as that.

All that was her was sick to its very core, she hated herself and she would have to debase and kill herself a thousand times over to even begin to set it right, but right now her job had to be done, so she enforced her will upon this world by pressing the trigger.

The wrist that was holding the hand that was holding Harmonica blew up, opening a rift to the light that was barely concealed inside and this, somehow, managed to make things worse.

“IN THE HEAD! NOW SHOOT HIM IN THE FUCKING HEAD!!!” screamed Harmonica as she rolled on the floor. She had no illusions that it was going to work but it didn’t hurt to try.

Telescopica had a gun in her hands and Harmonica was still running amuck, the job wasn’t done, she pulled the trigger.

A second explosion and the two blue stars became one, much bigger. The light didn’t stop, the ground beneath their feet started cracking, the walls were falling to pieces all around them, the one final blast that would erase humanity was coming and there was no way for them to stop it.

From the throat of the brain shattered creature nothing was coming but a whimper.

* * *

 

            She was on all fours, firehosing foam out of her mouth and experiencing multiple orgasms. She was currently blind because her eyes were really interested in seeing what was inside her skull. She could feel her missing teeth growing back in. These were the consequences of experiencing the Tzar’s light at full blast, and soon everyone else would feel it too except the effects there would be a lot worse. Something had to be done about this.

            She tried to focus her view back on her objective who, by the way, hadn’t exploded yet but any second now would. His brain was currently porridge spilled on the floor, so that clearly was not the origin for the spark that set the fire alight. There was a small fire burning as of right now and the wood that was the world was about to burn with it. In this metaphor what had to be done was drown the fire, with water or dirt, it had to be suffocated, it had to be contained and it just so happened that they had the perfect container here, made by the emperor himself, thirty four years and three months ago. There was one more option to try, since all other options had failed.

            She stood up, all her clothes long burnt away, and yelled.

            “SISTER! ONE MORE SHOT!”

            To were she pointed, Telescopica aimed.

            And the center of the engorged torso of the beast blew open exposing the core from where all cracks in this world had started. A heart. A cracked yet still beating heart, pumping mirthful light into existence, ready to blow up.

            Harmonica climbed the bloated body and crawled into the recently made hole, snuggling, making herself cozy, molding her body into the fleshy nest, covering it, using her whole to block the light, shielding the rest of the world from it. She extended her arms and wrapped them around the pumping organ. Rubbing her head all over it as if it were the coziest pillow. She wrapped her legs around it as well, her face was deeply buried within the many lobes and ventricles of it. She enjoyed the moment for what it was for a couple of seconds and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she started eating.

            And slowly, one bite at the time, the light started to disappear from this world, inside of her mouth. Shrinking, receding, deflating. After a couple of minutes it was all over.

            The mirthful monster was dead. The world had been saved.

* * *

 

            Maurice stood up, slightly dizzy.

            His body was hurt, his soul was hurt. But it was merely soreness, it was not longer hurting, it just hurt. It was weakness that was soon to be quenched. All he had to do now was rest, it was the time for healing.

            He took two steps and fell to the floor since he tripped on a big piece of metal. He turned to see that it was a giant weapon that had been thrown to the ground, discarded like an old broom. The very idea seemed ridiculous, something that big and intricate was too valuable to be left behind like that, too heavy to be simply dropped. He laughed at it.

            He caught himself surprised, when was the last time he had done that? It felt like ages and yet it came so easily now, no oxidation, no delay or hesitation, it was the most natural thing in the world. He laughed again as he rose to his feet one more time.

            He was almost about to fall a second time when he saw the scene in front of him. A giant headless body, almost in proportion with the weapon he had just seen, was lying on the ground. It took him a long time to understand where it had come from until he realized, that had been the Tzar. How could it be? Wasn’t he like immortal or something? Maurice had been sure this was the case and yet here it was, dead. This was perplexing but he took it in with a shrug. First boss gets fired, second one gets killed by first boss and the third one dies as well. This was by far the worst job he had ever had.

            He walked a little closer to the corpse of the giant and he saw that on top of it was a woman, on her knees, trying to reach something in the center of it. He climbed the body as well and felt surprise when feeling how hard it was. It felt no different from climbing a mountain.

            Once he was beside the woman he could see that she was kneeling on top of a hole, carved in the center of the monster’s chest, her arms reaching towards something lying in the middle of a puddle of blood and guts. It was a baby, with blond hair, resting amidst the gore, one thumb in her mouth and the woman’s hand gently stroking her head.

            “What the fuck…?” he asked.

            “Shhhhhh” said the woman, with a gentle smile “she’s sleeping”

 

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

            She traveled through the city she never thought she’d meet. It looked far smaller than she expected. Perhaps it was the fact that by now most of the old suburbs and everywhere that wasn’t exclusively the old commercial district had been reclaimed by nature or entropy. Whatever the case might be, Xandra’s first thought about the capital was that it wasn’t as pretty as her old town used to be. And her old town hadn’t been that pretty to begin with.

            She saw the cracked concrete and the streets filled with weeds and old rusted vehicles that sprawled all around, she saw the old electrical chords hanging from ancient poles, she saw abandoned buildings and she saw open sewers. But the most remarkable view was that of the demolished palace. The place had finally resigned and its faults had finally given way to become the rubble it was always meant to be. The occasional pillar or column would stand amidst the dust and rocks but they were no longer holding a roof on top of them. Majesty gave way to decay. One more ruin added to this world. And yet the blue skies and the bright sun of the day were robbing the scene of its due dourness. She felt the breeze going through her hair as the car in which she rode made its way across the streets, driven by a big burly guy with a smile on his face.

            “So” said Xandra to her old friend “how’s your job treating you?”

            “Oh it’s harrowing!” Maurice answered cheerfully, with his typical humor “it’s just the worst, I don’t think I have ever been as miserable as I was this last couple of weeks, but you know” he concluded while shrugging “it’s a living”

            “I see” she answered, amused.

            “I gotta say, it got a lot better since I killed my last boss”

            “You…” she had to take pause “you killed the Foremost?”

            “No, my other boss, the emperor, you might have heard of him?”

            “Oh” he clearly was just jesting but still, there was a powerful implication in his joke “so is it true…? Is it true that it…? That the monstrous….?”

            It felt wrong to say that here, especially where his power had been so concentrated but the man brushed off her doubts.

            “Psshhh, don’t worry, he is gone, he is kaput, he is as dead as a city filled with bridges!”

            Her brow furrowed at this, he was giving unimaginably good news and yet he had to do it with such tasteless a joke. He realized this.

            “Oh, sorry” he apologized “Is just that…well, compared with what’s been going on here lately the loss of our city doesn’t seem that big a deal anymore”

            “I understand” she said.

            “So, how’s the old man? What was his name again?”

            “Judah, and he is fine, not as fine as he thinks since he insists in working on the farm as hard as he can, but he is fine, he would be finer though is someone actually bothered to repair the mill”

            “Well, that is exactly why we asked you to come here, this way” Maurice said turning the wheel with his hammy arm to direct the vehicle to their destination, which was away from the palace “as for why no-one has sent anyone to help your town, well, we’ve been a little busy, you know, toppling the monstrous emperor from his mirthful throne and all, but now that this is done is time to rebuild! Or the way Chernobyl likes to say: ‘Make world better place” Maurice imitated, badly.

            “Chernobyl?”

            “Oh right! You didn’t know! That’s the actual name of the Foremost! Can you believe it? Who would call their son after that place? He says it’s the place he and his brothers were born, which might start explaining why they were so fucking weird”

            “So his name is Chernobyl…” she mused, her gaze lost on the horizon “I’m glad he feels comfortable enough to use it now, I never liked his official title”

            “Yeah, Noble Jerry was a shitty title, I agree”

            “No, I meant…oh, shut up you”

            The vehicle rode on until they finally reached a building that had once been a church, to then later become a library, and which now was the new government offices for the new emperor. They stepped out of the car and climbed the stone stairs that led to the giant wooden doors.

            Inside they found a table, not a round one, but surrounded by people all the same. There was, at one side, far away from everyone else, a black woman, with nothing but raw loathing on her face directed at no-one in particular and to everything at the same time; at the other side there was a man with his hairy chest bared  and a wide smile on his face, this made it the second one Xandra saw that day, which made it an inordinately good one; next to the man, talking, perhaps with not as much cheer in her face but certainly with good spirits, was a blonde woman, wearing a black suit and shirt, her skin a crisscross of scars,  one of which was crossing her left eye, leaving it permanently bloodshot. She was holding in her arms an infant girl, of no more than four or five years of age. Maurice directed his friend towards that woman in particular.

            “And here I want to present to you…Harmonica” he said “the criminal that destroyed our city!”

            The blonde woman turned her head, abandoning at once the conversation she was holding with the bare-chested man, to see the newcomers, her expression immediately hostile, her hands holding the child just a bit tighter.

            Xandra was at a loss for words.

            “I liked you more when I first met you” said the blonde woman to the man “you were less annoying”

            “Oh, she deserves to meet the person that destroyed her home” he answered like it was no big deal.

            “Are…are you…?” stammered Xandra.

            “What? Her?” interrupted her friend “no! Of course not, her name is Telescopica, she’s the queen of the kingdom of the dawning moon! No, I meant her little sister, her” he said pointing at the little girl who was smiling a far too toothed grin.

            “Oh” said Xandra, just another of Maurice stupid jokes “that’s really not funny”

            “But it’s true! Is it not?” he asked the woman he had just called queen, as if she was an old drinking pal.

            “Yes” Telescopica answered “but still, you shouldn’t go around divulging sensitive information, if I find out you told anyone else…”

            “Oh I’m sure you will unleash all sorts of horrors on me” he said with the confidence of someone who knew that he had already taken the worst life could offer and was not scared of it ever getting worse than that.

            “No, I’ll just kill you, plain and simple, I don’t care what Chernobyl says”

            “Wait, but then…are you actually telling me…?” said Xandra even more confused than before.

            “Yep!” Maurice said, grinning wildly at his friend “though apparently to say anymore would be a suicidal gesture so no thank you, I already got over my depression”

            “This doesn’t make any sense” she replied to which Telescopica added.

            “Forget you heard anything, and also, the same threat goes to you” her hand was stroking the child’s head protectively while the little girl seemed oblivious to all of this and just laughed with the purity only a kid knows.

            Maurice lead his friend away from that place by the arm, whispering.

            “Don’t worry, it’s a very long story but I’ll explain it later”

            “I heard that!” said Telescopica.

            “I know!” he answered with cheer.

            The queen only shook her head and went back to the conversation with the hairy man.

            They sat in front of the table, next to the angry woman, whose eyes were still lost on the distance as if everything that surrounded her was deeply offensive to everything that she had once stood for.

            “Why does she look so bothered?” murmured Xandra on her friend’s ear. He just shrugged. Yet however careful she might have pronounced those words the woman seemed to have heard them all the same for she turned her head towards them and said, with a tired, wounded voice.

            “My husband was killed by the man that is going to lead this meeting and this country, yet if I must have a voice at all for what the course of my nation is going to be then I must make council with him, I must make amends and talk and negotiate and listen as if he were not a murderer, as if his hands were not soaked in blood”

            Xandra could have pointed out how she and the man beside her were alive thanks to the Foremost, but she had seen Chernobyl kill a baby as he held in his arms and then walk away from it as if he had just stepped on a bug. She, unlike her friend Maurice, understood better about what was appropriate and what was not so she simply said.

            “I’m very sorry for your loss, and I admire your strength for doing this”

            “It is not strength” the angry woman answered “it is simply what has to be done if my children are meant to have a future at all”

            The two friends drove their gaze away from the woman, feeling uncomfortable. There was nothing else to be said.

            They waited while the conversation between Telescopica and the hairy man continued, listening to it since there were no other noises, beyond the child’s occasional chuckle, to drown it out.

            “…glad that the Godslayer was finally able to do what it was always meant to do at the end”

            “It wasn’t just the gun but it helped, yes…wait, did you just call it the ‘godslayer’?”

            “Its official name was the FIP-4-56-k, but the boys at the shelter gave it that nickname, rolled better of the tongue”

            “It seems to me it’s self defeating to call it that, you shouldn’t compare your enemy to a god, it hurts morale”

            “I’m not going to argue against that, but you are the one that actually went and fought him face to face so you tell me how accurate it is”

            Telescopica was silent for a second.

            “It was accurate, yes” she replied.

            “So you killed god?” asked the little girl that was in the queen’s arms.

            “We killed him, sister” said the blonde woman hunching her head so she could kiss the infant’s forehead while everyone else laughed. Laughter. That was something Xandra hadn’t heard in a while. If this new world was capable of having laugh in it, then perhaps it wasn’t so bad a world, perhaps there was still hope.

            From the front door, the emperor entered.

            Chernobyl looked older, and stiffer. He was wearing glasses but these were not the black, thick rimmed he used to sport. These were round, black crystals without frame, the metal bridge that clutched his nose was holding the lenses against his face. His clothes were no longer the uniform he carried everywhere but just a simple shirt, buttoned all the way up to his neck, and a pair of khaki slacks. He walked firm yet not with the confidence of an officer but rather the mechanical way in which a tin soldier would. His hands were clasped to his sides as if a pair of springs were pulling them towards his back. With every step his knees refused to bend. In this fashion he made his way towards the table while everyone stared in silence. He sat down next to Telescopica.

            Nobody said a thing.

            “Good morning, citizens” he said “I am glad to see you all here, there is still one more person left to come but I believe meeting can start right now and we will catch that person up when she arrives, first of all I want to dedicate this meeting to our nation’s greatest hero…Gury Yarimov, the Kosmonauvt, the last one in the world, his sacrifice and his work throughout the decades has been invaluable and he will not be forgotten…thank you captain Yarimov”

            There was a minute of silence.

            “Good, now as you all probably know by now, Tzar is dead, the monstrous emperor sits no longer in throne…in fact there is no longer throne really, it has been destroyed alongside rest of imperial palace…which is why we are meeting here, yes?”

            He didn’t seem to be sure how to continue, his eyes went from one person to the next trying to think what to say.

            “This means” interjected Telescopica “that now the relationships between the kingdom and the empire will become that of allies, interchanging needed resources and advice for the betterment of both nations”

            “Yes, thank you” said the emperor, glad for the help.

            In the end they had both decided that a marriage was not needed, such things were usually done when there was a nation to awe or bureaucracy to attend, but the actual infrastructure that separated the territories, both material and paper wise, was almost none existent, barely a couple of maps that indicated the geographical limits and that was it. The way they saw it they could just work together treating both the kingdom and the empire as one for all practical purposes. A biumvirate, as it were. Later, when the nations were rebuilt, they would worry about such trivialities, but as of right now it was too early, the foundations not even properly laid yet, to start worrying about that.

            “And with that in mind” Chernobyl proceeded “we invited you all here, different people from different parts of world with different perspectives, to hear voices, ranging from neighboring kingdom” he said, pointing at the woman next to him “through people who lived within it their entire lives” then he indicated with his open palm toward the angry woman “including people who lived in both places” this time he signaled Xandra and Maurice “and finally the people who lived outside system entirely” his gesture stopped at the man with his chest bared “all of you will bring different perspectives on matters of what should be done and how to do it to fix current state of planet, any questions?”

            “I have a question” said the black woman

“I do truly apologize but I must ask, what was your name?”

“Amber” responded she, curt “why are you in charge, instead of behind bars, or executed for your crimes against us?”

            The man with the glasses turned to look at the woman who questioned him, everyone else fidgeted on their sits, awkward for the reminder of the current emperor’s past deeds.

            “I have two answers” he said “to the question of why I am not behind bars, it is because I do not want to be there when I can be here helping, and there is no one to put me there”

            The black woman’s face didn’t tense up nor did it frown any further. If anything it relaxed, due to her view of the man as a crooked criminal being reinforced in front of others.

            “As for why am I in charge” he proceeded, getting up from his chair “that is not quite so, Telescopica is in charge alongside me but if anyone wants to occupy place, then do sit here, take control of entire empire and make sure to dedicate every day for rest of your life to problem of fixing world, of coordinating and directing and deciding and managing for what is probably going to be twenty four seven the work that will have to be done”

            To this he extended his arms.

            “So who is it going to be? You Maurice?”

            “HA! Nice one, no but thank you, I’m happy with my job as it is” said the burly man, waving his hand as it he was swatting away flies.

            “Then what about you Xandra? Would you like to help the world? You have taught me a great deal of things and I believe there is even more you could tech to all of us”

            The woman nodded with her head. He had undeniably changed from the first time she met him, she fully believed him when he said that he had learned things from her. But that didn’t make him any less clever, any less calculating. As far as she was concerned, if someone would have asked her she would have said that the man was making his first stumbles into what could be considered goodness, even redemption. That didn’t change the fact that he still was a cunning man.

            “I believe I already have enough responsibilities as it is” she said.

            “I understand” he replied and then moved on to the hairy man “and you…um, I am sorry, you name was?”

            “Kommando” the man replied, the smile he had been sporting while talking to Telescopica was gone, his current expression was not a hostile one, but it was weary all the same.

            “Right, Kommando, you were raised by the people who were meant to destroy me and my brother, perhaps you are also unsatisfied with me taking charge of things alongside Telescopica?”

            The outsider stood up, breathing deeply as if he needed the extra air to stay upright. One arm was bent so he could scratch the back of his head.

            “I…um…yeah, I don’t really feel I can comment on the situation one way or the other, considering how, uh….I was mostly isolated from the outside world so is not like I am well informed or anything, I wouldn’t say you come across as a trustworthy guy…but I trust Telescopica for what that’s worth, I mean, I don’t have anything else to go by and I only hanged out with her for a couple of days at most…uh…I guess what I’m trying to say here is…she seems to be ok with this so I’ll go with that unless you give me a reason to dislike you”

            Kommando let his arm drop to his side and he stood up there, not knowing what else to say.

            “You can sit back down now” helped Telescopica.

            The man let himself drop back into the chair, making the wood creak.

            “Thank you for your trust Kommando” said Chernobyl “now as for you” he turned one final time towards the black woman “Amber, I know you have many, many reasons to hate me, to want to see me dead even, I understand, I can not satisfy that desire, but would you like to occupy my position then? To become the new empress alongside Telescopica?”

            The silence hanged on the room.

            Yes. She wanted to say yes. She so desperately wanted to shut that man’s face, to defy him, to prove him wrong, to throw every little one of his plans into disarray and make him choke on his own words.

            But she knew that if she took that position she wouldn’t be able to be there for her children as often as she would like, if she really pretended to do all the work that was necessary to fix all the problems that had to be fixed in order for them to have a better future. She could be their mother or their empress. Not both. And she knew her choice well.

            “No”

            “It is settled then” Chernobyl concluded, sitting back on his chair.

            “You didn’t ask her!” said the little girl in Telescopica’s arms, pointing at her big sister.

            “You are correct, little girl” he said with a smile, indulging the infant.

            He had agreed on keeping the secret of Harmonica and letting the child be, on account that she would get a second chance to be raised better, alongside a sister that would actually care for her this time around. On top of this the fact was that by all means and purposes to spend over ten years growing up until she became an independent adult was basically its own form of imprisonment. Also it didn’t hurt that he hadn’t been personally attacked by Harmonica’s actions in the past and so he didn’t have any particular urge or need to see her being punished for whatever crimes she might have committed.

            “What do you think then Telescopica?” Chernobyl asked “do you agree with me being new emperor?”

            He had no idea what the woman would answer, it could very well be supportive as it could be damning but he was curious all the same. From the first moment he had investigated that woman after Geometrica warned him about her, he had been fascinated. In a way she was everything that he had always wanted to be, cold, professional, efficient. He didn’t lie when he told her that he had no real romantic feelings towards her but there was admiration all the same.

            “I think you are powerful and I think you are well informed, that makes you useful” said the woman to his question “I think you are smart and you know what you’re doing and I think we need that, also I don’t really care about what you did back when you were the Foremost”

            See? This woman understood him, she got it, and he respected her for that.

            “I think that is good way to move on to next topic of meeting” he said, nodding “what we need to do, now this is going to be general outline of plan I have developed, you are welcome to criticize or add improvements if you see fit, as of right now it is as follows:”

            “Biggest concern is rivers, both for the land they take away and the water they contaminate, luckily it has been proven in the past that a city can thrive when surrounded by undrinkable water” while saying this he gave a look to Xandra and Maurice “we know how to purify water from ichor, so this is no concern, as for structure of whatever cities we might have to build once all land has eroded, it can be islands connected by bridges or it can be floating cities, another possible solution could very well be to build dams on the existing rivers or to build artificial rivers to redirect the flow of their water, thankfully my abilities lend themselves well to carving the earth” he decided not to comment on the possibility of him loosing control of those powers as time went on, they would cross that hurdle once they got to it.

             “Second biggest problem is with production of food, as of right now capital has gotten by through extortion and plundering of resources created by villages and farms that are strewn around empire, this situation can no longer go on, not only because of moral reasons but also because such exploitation of capital will make it so it burns out faster, it is unsustainable, the existing farms and villages will be from now on left alone so they can recuperate and thrive, whatever assistance capital can spare for them, will be given; on top of this new farms will be created to provide for capital, within capital’s own borders”

            “I have a question” asked Xandra.

            “Yes?”

            “Is just…it’s good to hear that the bandit is gone and that the villages will be left alone, and on top of that, that we will be given assistance but I’m wondering, do we have the resources to make all this?”

            “As of right now I have one of the old inquisitors making a tally of all the resources and human capital we have available, she should have been right here in this meeting but the job turned out to take a little longer than expected, still, with any luck she’ll get to finish before this meeting ends and we’ll be able to see what we have available”

            “But that sounds like we are going at it backwards” said Maurice “shouldn’t we first see how much we got before we decide in what are we going to spend it?”

            “I am enumerating the things that HAVE to be dealt with, regardless of how much we can spare” answered Chernobyl “these steps are not negotiable, if we don’t follow through with them there is not going to be world standing few years from now”

            “What about her kingdom?” asked Amber pointing at Telescopica with a nod of her head “Can she spare any help our way?”

            Every eye turned to the queen on the neighboring nation who withstood every gaze without the slightest disturbance.

            “I am sorry to say I’m not fully aware what is the current state of my kingdom, I hadn’t had the time to go there and take stock of the situation, my mother had been in charge of it when I left and, being honest, I must say, she wasn’t fit for the role, from what little I recall the situation was much the same as it was here, raided by the bandit and choked by the expansion of rivers, our only advantage is that we didn’t have the psychological effects of having the emperor within our borders, nor the more…despotic measures instilled by the previous Foremost, perhaps the morale in our population is comparatively higher, perhaps it is not, I wont be sure until I return there, of course goes without saying that we will give any help we can spare, however little it might end up being”

            She looked at no-one while saying this, when she stopped she didn’t give any sign to indicate she was finished or that she gave the word to someone else, she just stopped talking and stood there silently. None of the present showed any relief or relaxation at this. For many it was the first time they heard her talk at length and they were getting their gauge on the type of person she was. Their first impressions were of someone cold and rough. Regal in her composure but lacking the warmth or nurture that a good leader ought to have. Then again, their current emperor wasn’t so much of that either.

            The only one who didn’t seem to have this impression of her, besides Chernobyl, was the small girl that sat on her lap. She looked up at her from where she was with a silly grin in her face. A small chubby arm was trying to reach her sister’s chin which was somehow spoiling the impression of severity and strength the woman gave.

            “Very well” the emperor went on “the long term is to stabilize state of both our lands, once survival is ensured we will begin to scout and explore other half of world, the cracked half”

            To this the tension in the air raised, not in a hostile manner but an intrigued one. The crack in the world, the doomed, shattered place. A continent of horror but also of mystery. Nobody knew what had been going on there for the last three decades. Sure there were stories about landscapes of rotting corpses from where the ichor had came, but no-one except Tzar and the man standing in front of them had actually seen it with their own eyes, and Chernobyl had only been a ten year old, dazzled by his own brother’s power, so his recollection was not to be completely trusted.

            “We will send explorers to survey land and see what was left, hopefully after all this time some of it healed or at very least is inhabitable in some capacity…”

            He was interrupted by the big wooden doors opening and a woman who entered with a giant hat and a yet bigger cape, carrying stacks upon stacks of papers. The first inquisitor.

            “Sorry for being late Foremost citizen!” she said, anxious, to the emperor.

            “Oh, no problem inquisitor!” answered Maurice, the actual current Foremost.

            The woman stopped, looking confused at the man who had answered for a few seconds before she got her bearings.

            “Oh!” she said, quickly blushing “I am so sorry! Emperor! I meant emperor! I can’t believe I forgot…!”

            “It is fine” Chernobyl said “welcome Jarrah, I’m glad you could join us”

            “Yes, thank you emperor” she said trying to bow with her load of papers, cheeks still as crimson as her cape.

            “Please, sit, share with us the information that you managed to gather”

            The woman tried to accommodate her cape so she could sit comfortably and then she spent about five minutes reorganizing her papers while everyone watched her. She was constantly mumbling apologies as she did this.

            Once she was finally well and ready she perked up and asked the emperor.

            “Ok, what information do you want to know?”

            “For the projects that I proposed we will need workers, lots of them so my first question is: how much people we have available?”

            “Yes, good, ok…I, uhm…let me see” she fumbled with her data a bit more. Telescopica was good at reading tension and she could tell the woman called Jarrah was stalling. “Here! Here it is, one more time I’d like to apologize for taking so long, you see, I just wanted to make absolutely sure that the data I had was correct and as you imagine the records haven’t been the most meticulous as of lately, not that it is any fault of yours, my emperor, I just meant that…”

            “Get on with it” said Telescopica, not yelling, but curt enough to cut the words that were spilling from the agent’s mouth.

            “Yes, sorry, well” Jarrah cleared her throat and took a deep breath of air “so, according to the records of about ten years ago there were around ten thousand people living on the empire back then”

            Chernobyl nodded, he remembered when he did that census a decade past, he remembered how he had decided it was not worth the effort to do it ever again. The inquisitor went on.

            “Now according to the latest data in amount of deaths versus amount of births within our borders I extrapolated what the current population would be, keep in mind this number is merely an approximation and there could very well be small cells of population throughout our territory which we are unaware of but if such cells exist, they would be too small to meaningfully impact the data so…yes, our current population, barring recent events, should be around…four thousand people”

            Everyone’s eyebrows rose at this, a net loss of six thousand people in ten years, they were loosing too many lives and not replenishing them at all, if the current trend continued….

            “Barring recent events?” asked Kommando.

            “Well, ehm…” the woman was getting more flustered with every passing second “see, a nation wide census was out of the question with our current resources but I was able to personally count the citizens within the capital and…after the previous emperor’s actions…there have been some regrettable casualties which…”

            “How many?” asked Amber with a slight irony to her voice.

            “Um…one in every three people died…most of them by suicide I believe”

            “Wait” interjected Maurice “what percentage of the population lived inside this city?”

            “Fifty percent” answered Chernobyl, his voice monotonous.

            “That means the actual total population would be close to 3300 people” said Telescopica instantly.

            No-one said anything at this.

            “And that is too little” she concluded.

            “We will have to consolidate” said the Emperor “we will bring them all here and we will need every single one of them working on the construction of…”

            “That’s not going to work” said Kommando “you need to mobilize fifteen hundred people who are spread over the entire territory of the country, you will have to scout the land, you will have to engage with them, you will have to persuade them to abandon the place they probably lived their entire lives in and then you will have to find the way to transport all of them here”

            “We have transportation” said Chernobyl.

            “Uhm…not exactly” said Maurice “we have only one vehicle left, the one I used to bring Xandra, and it’s not in the best conditions, we barely used it, that is why it was the only one left, every other motorized means of transportation we had was destroyed, I guess we could send messengers on foot but still, it could take months…years even”

            Everyone reflected on this sobering thought.

            “Is there anything else you’d like to know, my emperor?” asked Jarrah, trying to change the subject.

            “I would like to know about food” said Xandra “let’s say we manage to bring people here, most of them probably farmers, in the time they get here, get established, build their new farms and everything else it will probably amount to a full year in which they’ll be producing no resources so how much do we have as of right now?”

            The inquisitor was silent.

            “Answer her question” ordered the emperor.

            “There is enough food for a month…to feed exclusively the people in this room…and no-one else”

            Almost everyone present gasped or released exclamations of horror.

            “The city doesn’t produce any food at all, our only source of food and indeed of any resource for the capital” went on Jarrah, looking at her lap “was the Tax collector, either from his raids to the ruins of abandoned cities or his…taxation to the citizens of the empire” she didn’t add that sometimes that taxation came in the form of the very flesh of the citizens of the empire, everyone knew that and nobody wanted to acknowledge it.

            “So you’re telling us” said Amber, her anger taking over the veins in her neck “that unless we establish a new bandit we are all going to starve in a month?”

            “I’m…I’m just…” said Jarrah, sinking in the folds of her cape “…I’m just telling you the data…”

            “What about your base Kommando?” asked Telescopica “can you lend us your resources?”

            “For about fifteen hundred people? They would only add a couple more months before running out”

            “Very well” said the queen “then once I return to my kingdom I’ll make sure to send all I can, we didn’t have any bandit and we got by, we got by even with the bandit’s taxation, I’m sure we can spare some more to buy you time to establish new farms with the people you have in the city”

            “We will need a year at very least” said Chernobyl “we will have to ration it very carefully”

            “What a time for me to start my diet” murmured Maurice at Xandra. She didn’t smile at this.

            “It seems project of rebuilding world will take a bit longer than we first thought” commented Chernobyl “we might not live long enough to see it completed, or even half way through…but if we live long enough to see it started at the very least then I am sure that our effort will not have been in vain”

            Nobody seemed assured by this.

            “There…there is one more thing…” said Jarrah with barely a wisp of a voice, looking down. Her face was covered by her hat.

            “What is it?” he asked.

            “I…I been examining the satellite information that the Kosmonavt sent throughout the years, specifically the pictures that his vessel took of the crack and automatically sent to the station”

            “That is not priority as of right now, well deal with that on the oncoming years” said the emperor.

            “Well…yes, but also, no, I mean…is just that…”she searched across her documents and pulled out one photo in black and white before holding it so everyone could see it “I think we don’t have many years”

            The picture showed the shadowed side of the earth, the night kept the crack invisible.

            “This picture was taken twenty five years ago…this other was taken last year”

            The second picture was also on black and white, also showing the other side of the world at night, except this time, where there should have been only and expanse of black camouflaging with the rest of space, there were lines. Lines of light, crisscrossing and zigzagging all around the hemisphere, some as wide as continents.

            “What are those?” asked Maurice “cities?”

            “They are the crack in the world” answered the inquisitor, by now her voice had gone beyond shyness and had settled for robotic professionalism.

            This was the first time any of the presents saw it, throughout their lives they had been aware of it much in the same way that one is aware of the planets in the sky. People tell you they are there and you believed them. But here they were actually seeing the full dimension of it, it was in front of them, in all of its horror, all of its madness, all of its glory.

            “The infrared measurements indicate that they are at around two thousand degrees Celsius which would put their depth in the middle of the earth’s mantle, as you can see for the configuration of the continents and the lines across their borders, the size of the oceans has decreased drastically…the cracks are getting wider…and deeper…your project to drain or redirect the rivers wont be really necessary, my emperor, soon they’ll be drained by themselves…and replaced by lava”

            “But…”

            “There is strong evidence to suggest that the interaction between the crack and the oceans had devastating effects on all aquatic life” she pressed on, mechanically, once she had started she couldn’t stop until she was done “the spectrographic data indicates unprecedented levels of acidity on the seas, I believe all the oceans are dead which would explain a lot better where the ichor that keeps contaminating the rivers comes from”

            By this point no-one dared interrupt her; she took a deep breath ready to say the last thing that had to be said.

            “At the current rhythm of growth, the planet has no more than fifteen years left”

            There it was, she said it all. She had kept this information not daring to pronounce it, to even fully formulate the thought, and now it was out and it was real and it was inevitable. She sat a few seconds to then rise abruptly from her seat.

            “P-please excuse me…” she said before leaving the room with tears on her eyes, her red cape trailing behind her.

            As soon as the giant wooden door closed on her departure everyone else in the room started to desperately get up so they could leave as fast as possible.

            “Xandra? Xandra where are you going?”

            “I have to go back with Judah! Don’t try to stop me Maurice!”

            “Xandra wait!”

            “Everyone! Please! Stop!”

            “Do not dare to stop me Cher, my children will never become adults and you will not keep me one more second away from them”

            “Amber, listen…”

            “Do not call me by my name! You don’t get that privilege, now stand aside!”

            “Kommando?”

            “I’m sorry Telescopica but my base became a haven and there will be people desperate to take it from me, I have to go protect it”

            “I understand, go”

            “What are you going to do?”

            “Telescopica, please, I need your help, convince these people to stay, there has to be something we can do, we can still save world! There is still hope!”

            “Chernobyl…”

            She looked at the man’s face.

            He didn’t look pretty. His factions were too rough, too prominent. He looked hard, there was a natural sense of anger, of threat, to his natural expression that couldn’t be dispelled until after interacting with him for a while and realizing that what could be taken as hostility was just awkwardness. Infinite awkwardness, product of growing up since he was ten years old in an environment where he and his brothers were in charge of a nation. He had never had the chance to learn how to interact with people in any other capacity but that of an authority figure whose sole recourse to get respect was insurmountable destructive power.

            She could also see her own face reflected behind those dark crystals that were hiding his eyes. If she could see beyond the shades she would witness the myriad scenes that the mirth which ran through his veins had etched into his irises across an entire life of violence. She would see her own sister being consumed by the light, she could see the moon, she could see a whole squad of rectifiers pointing at her with his melting weapons, she could see a poor family cowering desperately in front of her, she could see rebels dying as she gazed upon them, she could see a baby disintegrating in her arms, she could see a wall coming down, she could see death and destruction in a thousand different iterations, she could see all of that.

            And she answered, clutching the person she had crossed countries and killed multitudes for.

            “…I don’t care”


	21. EPILOGUE

**EPILOGUE**

            One of the last eight people on earth was about to die. He wondered if once he got to hell he would even notice the difference.

            He was lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere, nearby rivers surrounded him, their depths unfathomable. As the cracks deepened so did their water level. Now more than rivers they were canyons, not formed by erosion but by fissure. From the depths a thick mist was rising, the water at the bottom far too close to the mantle, and getting closer every day.

            The ground beneath him was dry and inert. There was barely any plant life left in the world, certainly not near any river. The ichor had sipped into the ground after years rendering all soil infertile.

            Above him a perpetual layer of clouds moved at vertiginous speeds. The vapors of the poisoned rivers congregated on the skies and due to whatever properties they might had, they refused to condensate and fall back to the ground. On the one hand this was a good thing, nobody wanted venom falling from the sky, on the other hand he hadn’t seen the sun in four years.

            What had he expected? What did he think he was going to find? He had left his home once it had became obvious there was nothing left there for him to survive with, once the last cadaver had been cleaned from its flesh. He didn’t feel guilty for his anthropophagic diet. It wasn’t like he had killed them so he could consume them, it was just that every time someone did die everyone else agreed it would have been a waste to just let it rot. At the end he had been the last one left, all his companions inside of him one way or the other. No more plantations, no more stock, no more nothing to eat. So he left his home and started wandering in search of another place. A sedentary race forced to go back to its nomadic roots after millennia of civilization had made them forget how it was done.

            And now here he was, in the middle of nowhere, about to die, without even the strength to cut his own limbs to consume them, completely alone.

            “Ooooh, what’s this?” asked a female voice.

            He turned to lie on his back just so he could see the source of the voice.

            A teenage girl was standing next to him, amidst the mist. She looked emaciated, ragged and damaged. An eye patch covered one of her eyes and in turn her long blonde hair was covering part of her eye patch. Yet, despite all of this, she was smiling.

            “Help…please…” he tried to articulate, his voice bedraggled by the mist in the air.

            “Now how would I do that?” asked the girl in a cheerful voice.

            “F-food…”

            “Sorry, only have enough for me, can’t give you any” she didn’t look apologetic in the least.

            “P…please…I’m…begging…”

            “I’m really sorry but I can’t” she didn’t sound very apologetic, regardless of how much she was pouting at this “I need to live, I need to see how it ends you see? We’re so close! Only about a dozen people left and I could very well be the last! Can you imagine? Being the last one? Getting to be the only human being on the planet? I need to see what it’s like, how it feels!”

            The man let his head fall to the side, no longer having the energy to keep it upwards to see the girl. His hopes vanished, not that he had harbored many. Living in this planet had taught him better than that. The girl didn’t stop talking.

            “I mean I could hurry the process along, right? I could take matters into my own hands but see, I realized I would be then missing half the fun, there was a reason I used to kill people, I consider my self somewhat of a misery miser, someone who was blessed with shadenfraude, which is a real word by the way, I just, love it, so much, to see other people suffer, I have no idea why, I mean I do, it was my sister who fucked me up, coupled with the fact that I came from a long line of inbred monarchic assholes, but still, it boggles the mind the extent to which I enjoy it all”

            She was getting excited as she talked, she seemed to love the sound of her own voice.

            “But getting back on topic, I stopped killing because, for reasons that are too complex to go on detail now, people thought I had forgotten who I was, they thought I was going to cause no more problems from then on, people thought I was innocent again, but I remembered, of course I remembered! I remembered everything! But I kept my self from causing trouble, life was cushy and it wouldn’t have done to tip them off of my condition, I was going to wait and when they least expected it, BAM, knife through their throats or something, it would have been amazing, can you imagine their faces? Can you?”

            The man didn’t answer due to the stupor he had been drifting towards at the drone of the teenager’s monologue.

            “Oh, sorry” she said, lowering her voice to a hush “you’re feeling sleepy, here, let me help you”

            She pulled out the poncho she was wearing and folded it into a ball of cloth which she then used to rest the man’s head. After doing this she laid on the ground as well, using the man’s belly as a pillow. He started to groan a mumbled complaint.

            “Shush now, no need for words, just rest…as I was saying, I never actually had to do it, I never had to catch them by surprise to see horror in their faces, the world did that for me, and the thing is, I haven’t killed or hurt anyone ever since, the planet is already a horror show and there is nothing I could do to make it worse…so now I’m just happy wandering about, soaking in what life has to offer and let me tell you…life became so much easier”

            The man was still mumbling something though at this point it was impossible to tell whether it was angry or sad or just delirious. She for her part was happy looking the clouds above go by.

            “Anyway, I’m wondering what are they doing now? I’m sure he is still desperately trying to fix the world, poor guy, he thinks that just because he has infinite power he can do anything, last I heard of him he was trying to form a cult or something and go to the south pole to explore what’s there, he thinks the ice there is going to be an uncontaminated source of water and that the cold will balance out the progress of the lava, just think of how depressing that is? Isn’t it beautiful? Not to know when to let go? I mean, look at the world! It’s over, it’s done, it’s finished, think of it as a work of art, you can’t work on it forever, you have to reach a point where you realize you did everything you could do and now you have to let it end, to put the final stroke of the brush, the final line on the paper, but he refuses, he keeps working at it and in the end he is just going to be more miserable than how he started”

            She turned on her side, her ear pressed against his guts. A dozen different low organic rumbles could be heard, they were getting slower and she found this ever so relaxing. The man wasn’t speaking anymore and these guttural noises were the only indication that he was still alive. She yawned. When she talked again her voice sounded sleepy.

            “I don’t need to wonder what my sister is doing though, I know, she is still out there, looking for me, she likes to pretend she’s tough, you know? That she doesn’t care about anything but she does, she cares a lot…or at least she did until she found me, when she found me she…I dunno, she just stopped trying, I mean she was realistic about it, there was no point, this right here couldn’t be stopped, but all the same, at least the other guy kept trying…I didn’t like to see her like that so I escaped again, just to give her something to live for, just a little longer…”

            There were no more noises coming from the man’s gut, he was dead. She closed her eyes.

            “I hope she never finds me”

 

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here are my last thoughts on the story, you can read them here:
> 
> http://fipindustries.tumblr.com/post/161397601525/there-is-a-crack-in-the-world-afterthought


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